The day after the Bears lost to the New York Giants in the playoffs, the Bulls played host to the Milwaukee Bucks, the team they had just shouldered aside to seize first place in the division. It was the Bucks, and not the defending NBA champion Detroit Pistons, who led the Central Division for most of the first half of the season. While the Pistons suffered from their usual slow start and then a succession of injuries, and while the Bulls stumbled at the gate trying to integrate new team members, the Bucks perfected their plodding, disciplined style and became one of the surprises of the league.
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Last summer, while visiting Milwaukee’s County Stadium for a baseball game, I overheard an intense conversation between two sports fans seated behind me. One of them called Bucks coach Del Harris “the Whitey Herzog of the NBA.” The fan reasoned, “He never has anything to work with, but every year he takes his team to the playoffs.” Initially, the remark stuck because of how ridiculous it seemed, but the more I thought about it the more apt it became. It’s not a perfect parallel, but there’s something to it. Herzog, the former manager of the Saint Louis Cardinals, is known for his savvy and for his “carpet baseball.” He developed a reputation for building teams especially suited to play on artificial turf, which typically dictates crafty pitchers, quick fielders, fleet base runners, and, always, good managing–in short, baseball’s traditional fundamentals. Del Harris’s Bucks are not a running team–unlike the Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Lakers from the league’s Western Conference–but they are devoted to basketball’s fundamentals, to set plays run up and down the free-throw lane and back and forth along the baseline. There’s nothing prettier, in their style of play, than hitting someone wide open on the back door for a lay-in after he’s lost his defender on a pick. This is Harris’s style as a coach, and it’s made him successful wherever he’s gone; in the undisciplined NBA a team that runs plays on offense–like the Pistons or the Boston Celtics–is an anomaly and, usually, a consistent winner.
When the Bulls play the Bucks, what results is an extremely hard-fought game between teams of contrasting styles. While the Bucks set up picks, the Bulls set up their triangle offense, named for the configuration created by two perimeter shooters and a player with his back to the basket in the low post position. While the Bucks run their plays, the Bulls set Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen free to improvise within the triangle framework. Competition between the teams is fueled not only by divisional rivalry and the teams’ respective places in the standings, but also by the regional rivalry between the cities. (At this game Benny the Bull brought out a bogus Bucks mascot, complete with polka music and Tyrolean garb.)
And Jordan, while he remained, as usual, longer than the other players to answer reporters’ questions, was uncharacteristically terse. Someone pointed out that the Bulls’ 29-12 mark was the best mid-season record the team had achieved during his career. But Jordan shook his head. “Being a division leader and the attitude it takes to be a division leader, that’s something we’re learning,” he said. “At home, we’ve been playing well. On the road, we don’t play with the intensity that a division leader should have. We’re lackluster at the beginning of games, we get behind, and then we’ve got to struggle to get ourselves back into the ball game.
