Last weekend, in our circle, two questions were asked more than any others. One was, “What’s wrong with the Bears?” The other, “What’s wrong with the Bulls?” As the Bulls played only their first and second games of the season on Friday and Saturday, this reflects how absurdly high expectations are this year; nothing short of the National Basketball Association championship will do. Yet the Bulls have two rookies on the roster, and a third–now on the bench with an injury–who probably will come back to shake things up just when everyone else is settling into a nice groove. The Bulls are relying on a backup center who is little more than a rookie, and their new starting point guard–while he is one of the leaders on the team in seniority–is their old backup shooting guard, shifted across the court to move Michael Jordan out of the point guard position, where he functioned so well but under so much duress in the pressure-packed days of the playoffs last spring. Not to be forgotten is that the Bulls also have a new coach running the entire show. This team, talented as it is–and it won every one of its exhibition games–is a long way from developing the sort of chemistry that leads to NBA championships.
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While it’s nice to have three rookies around–especially when they’re all first-round picks–the biggest change for the Bulls since last spring is their new coach. Phil Jackson is a knowledgeable basketball man and a pleasant person, and while the former quality doesn’t do much to distinguish him from the departed Doug Collins, the latter certainly does. Jackson deals well with the press; when he smiles, which he does fairly often, his eyes squint and crow’s-feet shoot out toward the corners of his face almost like rays of light. Collins, on the other hand, was capable of ridiculing stupid questions (something I always sort of liked him for, actually); he had a driven personality and a pale complexion–as if his brain were draining all the blood from his face–on and off the court. He knows his basketball, however, as Jackson does (both are former players who earned reputations as thinking athletes), and while it’s too early to judge Jackson as a bench coach, the book is closed and ready for examination on Collins. After all, he took the Bulls to the NBA semifinals last season.
What this means, simply, is that Phil Jackson would be silly to get upset over a close opening-night victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers’ second-string standbys and a second-night loss to the Boston Celtics. Jackson, like Krause, has a picture of the team in the future–later this season, they hope–in which the Bulls can go up against the Pistons with the same two-squad depth. The most impressive thing about the Pistons last spring was that the Bulls’ starters could go out and wallop on Detroit for eight minutes, but then the Pistons would bring on their second string–a group that plays together almost as well as the first group, but with certain strategic head-to-head matchups that gave the Bulls a lot more trouble than even the first string could offer–and in two minutes the fresh players would erase the deficit and start building a lead of their own. That’s the wave of the future, and look at the future Bulls. The first string we already know about: Bill Cartwright is a good low-post center, Grant remains a developing power forward, and Scottie Pippen is complementing Jordan increasingly well as an open-court player. John Paxson is the starting point guard now, but Armstrong shows signs of being the most advanced of the rookies and will probably move Paxson out before long. After that, however, the second team is where the action is. Perdue shows signs of becoming a fine high-post center in the mold of Tom Boerwinkle, a big man with a fine passing sense, the ability to hit the open man in the flat or the guard cutting to the hoop on a backdoor play. If Perdue can consistently hit that 15-footer he must have hit in college (he averaged 17 and 18 points a game as a junior and senior at Vanderbilt in the rough-and-tumble Southeastern Conference), while playing decent defense (especially on the defensive boards), suddenly the Bulls are on their way to developing that able second string. King then can adapt to the pros by playing a low-post power forward, easing the transition from playing with his back to the basket as a college center, to playing facing the basket as a pro forward.
