1. Breaking up the Chicago Bulls after the 1998 season
ESPN’s “The Last Dance” documentary has brought a lot of attention to this front office failure over the past couple weeks which is great because until then this wasn’t discussed nearly enough.
For those unfamiliar, the Bulls decided before the 1997-98 season that it was going to be Phil Jackson’s last season. They made this decision in spite of the fact that Michael Jordan was adamant that he wasn’t going to play for another coach.
The documentary has painted this as a decision that was made by General Manager Jerry “Crumbs” Krause, who was already not popular with Jackson, Jordan, and Scottie Pippen, who berated Krause in front of the entire team.
And while Krause may have been the man with the idea to break up the team, the blame ultimately falls on the shoulders of their owner, Jerry Reinsdorf. The final decision belongs to the owner, and instead of taking the side of the greatest coach, player, and co-star in NBA history, he sided with the GM.
In today’s era of player empowerment and control, it’s almost impossible to imagine a GM getting his way over the star players on a team, especially when those star players are responsible for six championships in eight seasons.
There’s no guarantee the Bulls would have ever won again if they brought everyone back. They were breaking down during the 1998 season and the Spurs and Lakers were just about to take control of the league. But to not even try to defend your title and force the best player in the league into retirement is unfathomable.
The lifespan of a dynasty in the NBA isn’t complete until they are forced to pass the torch but the Bulls were never allowed that opportunity. We should have been able to watch Jordan and Pippen with their backs against the wall in the 1999 Finals against Tim Duncan’s Spurs. And if they survived that we should have seen them battle with the Kobe and Shaq Lakers of the early 2000s until they eventually couldn’t fend them off any longer.
Instead, they were eager to break up the greatest team ever and limped through a rebuild for a decade. Over the first seven years of their rebuild (1999-2006), a stretch that included six picks in the top 4 and a total of eight top 10 selections, they didn’t draft a single player that made an All-Star team as a member of the Bulls. It wasn’t until the 2007 and 2008 drafts that they were finally able to find their stars again in Joakim Noah and Derrick Rose respectively.
At the end of the day, Krause and Reinsdorf wanted more. More credit, more recognition, more respect for what they’d built in Chicago. They were never going to get all the credit, but now they have all the blame for how they let ego get in the way of the most successful dynasty since Bill Russell’s Celtics.