The standard offense of the Chicago Bulls is based on a series of rapidly forming triangles. The Bulls rely on outside shooting, and they typically deploy two players away from the basket with one under the basket on the strong side of the court, where they have the ball. Their strategy is to entice and exploit the double team, the standard defense of the National Basketball Association, where the zone defense is banned and where players are simply too skillful offensively to permit a stringent man-on-man. For instance, Michael Jordan might have the ball on the dribble near the right-hand side of the free-throw circle. Bill Cartwright might then be stationed near the basket on the right-hand side of the free-throw lane and John Paxson out wide, near the baseline and the three-point line. It’s Jordan in to Cartwright, and if one of the players guarding Jordan or Paxson collapses on Cartwright, then Cartwright passes to the open man. Or Jordan can pass to Scottie Pippen on the left-hand side of the free-throw circle, then cut down the lane and under the hoop, trying to scrape his man off against Cartwright or Horace Grant (stationed low on the right-hand side of the free-throw lane), emerging outside in the far right-hand corner of the court, creating a new Pippen-Grant-Jordan triangle. The Bulls can also post Jordan up or Pippen down low, almost certainly attracting the double team from outside and setting up Paxson or Craig Hodges for an open three-point shot. The Bulls don’t have the standard NBA lineup, with a big center and power forward: two big men to set picks for the little guys. They don’t have the personnel to consistently use the pick-and-roll or the baseline weave–two favorite tactics of the Detroit Pistons. The Bulls can use those plays, but they can’t rely on them. Instead they use their speed and quickness, sleight of hand, their skill as improvisers, to feint to one man and then seek the open player for the shot. When Cartwright and Paxson are shooting 50 percent, they are a very difficult team to beat, and when those players are shooting and Hodges is hitting three-pointers, they are just about invincible for any opponent.
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The Bulls, however, opened the second half with a couple of nifty plays, Jordan and Pippen cutting to the basket for layups, and suddenly the Bulls were ahead 55-52. More important, the Bulls instantly established that they could put a better group on the floor than the Bucks at any given time, and that it was simply a matter of not pissing the game away before the final five minutes. Here, however, the Bucks went to their scatback lineup, Pierce, Pressey, and Robinson, along with Lohaus and, in the middle, Greg “Cadillac” Anderson, the team’s designated enforcer. What designates him as the enforcer is that he looks it: six-foot-ten, 230 pounds, and with a face that–with its prominent chin and sloping forehead–has a profile like the front end of an automobile (although I’d say an old Hudson, rather than a Cadillac). This lineup gave the Bulls trouble, and the Bucks took a short-lived lead; there was no sense of rhythm to the Bulls’ improvising, no drumbeat or chord progression. They tied it at 70, however, and went ahead on a smooth play. With Jordan near the circle and Paxson out wide, Jordan passed in to Cartwright. Then both Jordan and Paxson scooted past Cartwright, leaving him to go one-on-one with Anderson, who’d just picked up his third foul. Cartwright made the 12-foot jumper to put the Bulls in front (he finished with 14, Grant with 15, and Jordan and Pippen with 36 and 32), and they held a 79-75 advantage through three quarters.
After the game, I thought to ask Jackson, who has a reputation as a thoughtful, philosophical man, whether there is a mystical, Eastern attraction to the Bulls’ fondness for triangle formations, but he was busy with other questions, and besides, when one keeps in one’s mind the image of Michael Jordan–in that moment of utter stillness before letting go the ball–there is no room for triangles or anything else.
