The Bulls have embarked on the 1991-92 season as the defending champions of the National Basketball Association, and it shows. That’s not necessarily a compliment, however. They began this season, as every season, looking ahead to their early west-coast road trip as a test of how good the team was. In the first couple of weeks, they allowed the remnants of their momentum from last spring to carry them along; they just sort of worked themselves into shape. They then went west for six straight games, while the circus took up residence at the Chicago Stadium, and the Bulls won every one, even defeating the powerful Trail Blazers in a wonderful double-overtime game in Portland, and all without Bill Cartwright, out with a broken hand.
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The same could be said for all the Bulls’ games since their return from the coast, but the Sonics game might have been the most obvious example. The Bulls were soundly beaten for almost 42 1/2 minutes, but their 16-point run in a five-and-a-half-minute stretch at the end of the first quarter and start of the second gave them an enduring lead. The Sonics got back to within five points at the half, a point in the third quarter, and three with 100 seconds to play, but the Bulls held on to win 108-103.
The Bulls are very much the same and very much different from the championship team of only a few months ago. The actual personnel changes have been few. This fall, Jerry Krause dealt Dennis Hopson, a disappointment who brought little to the playoff run last spring, for Bobby Hansen, a defensive specialist and role player who fits much better into the Bulls’ scheme. Hansen, a guard, has short bangs and relatively long, almost shoulder-length hair in the back, and with his pleasant, helpful demeanor he has the dry-look look and the ready smile of the lead guitarist in a female singer/songwriter’s band–say, Karla Bonoff.
Both teams came out sluggish. The Sonics, too, lacked their usual starting center, Benoit Benjamin, but they filled the spot by moving rebound expert Michael Cage over from forward. Cage looks something like Giancarlo Esposito, one of Spike Lee’s regular actors, but with a severe case of overabundant muscles. He’s no patsy, and he helped keep the Sonics in the game at the offensive boards.
King, Perdue, and the workmanlike, dependable Grant are the main reasons the Bulls are winning, but Jordan and Pippen remain the players who dictate the team’s character. They’re drifting now, simply turning up the pressure whenever they need it to win–keeping the Knicks at arm’s length in a 99-89 victory, then blowing past the Washington Bullets with a third-quarter flurry in an otherwise unspectacular 113-100 win later last week–and that is not likely to change until after the New Year. It’s a long season; the Bulls have already proved to themselves they have what it takes to win it all again. It’s just a matter of waiting for the proper times to show it, on any given night, and in the season as a whole.
