Before we return to the National Basketball Association final, let’s dwell–as the Bulls themselves have–on their victory over the Detroit Pistons. After all, we’re fans, not players, and a little reverie now isn’t likely to hurt our performance in appreciating the next game between the Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers.
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We got out to see the second game, at the Chicago Stadium, and it was our belief, as the stadium filled, that it was here that the Pistons would find out they were in much deeper than they thought, that the old tricks and the old ways would no longer work. That realization came in the second quarter. The Bulls had outplayed the Pistons in the first frame, but Joe Dumars hit for 15 points and single-handedly kept the Pistons close, down 27-22. In the second quarter, the Bulls brought Craig Hodges, Cliff Levingston, B.J. Armstrong, and Will Perdue off the bench to join Scottie Pippen, and beginning with a Perdue dunk 90 seconds into the frame, they ran the Pistons off the court. Two years ago the Bulls struggled to earn a lead against the Detroit starters, only to watch a fresh lineup come off the bench, at which point they folded, three straight games in a row. Now, however, it was the Bulls’ bench that was running the Pistons ragged; they amassed a 16-point lead before the starters began returning and allowed the lead to dwindle to eight at the half, the Pistons huffing and puffing all the way.
The Pistons’ would-be comeback set up the play of the game. The Pistons turned up the defensive pressure in the third quarter, and on offense they began running Michael Jordan through a series of vicious picks, like cotton going through a gin. Dennis Rodman blocked Jordan with a forearm shiver, then hit him again. Scottie Pippen, acting the enforcer for probably the first time in his life, blindsided Rodman, whacked him again, then got back across the lane in time to block a Mark Aguirre lay-up. Pippen came down with the ball, took it upcourt on the double, drove, and passed wide to John Paxson, who hit the open 15-foot jump shot to give the Bulls a solid 13-point lead.
They play the Lakers only twice a season, however, and no one–not the Bulls, and not their most knowledgeable fans–knew what would work and what wouldn’t beforehand. What everyone expected, though, was a series played, as Johnson said after game one last Sunday, “the way the game’s supposed to be played.” That, everyone got.
Here, Jackson sent Jordan, Pippen, Perdue, Armstrong, and Levingston into the game–a mobile lineup meant to press the Lakers–but Pippen picked up his fifth foul and had to sit down. With scrappy, ugly, but effective play on defense, however, and with Jordan converting the turnovers into baskets at the offensive end, the Bulls rallied to take a 78-75 lead.
Jordan sat down and added, “It took a North Carolina guy to beat me.”
