Not a Vintage Year : Bulls Showing Their Age, but Winning Ugly Is Still Winning

MIAMI — Fraying, decaying, assaying the possibilities of their retirements, relocations and/or retreats, the Chicago Bulls wheeze on, magnificent and revolting at the same time.

If they look creaky and incapable of their old artistry and domination, why can’t anyone beat them?

They’re 9-1 in the NBA playoffs heading into today’s Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals, 2-0 up on the Miami Heat. They’re favored to reach the NBA finals, where they’ll be favored to win their fifth title in Michael Jordan’s last five full seasons.

They’re the NBA version of wily Muhammad Ali rope-a-doping mighty George Foreman, an old team living by its wits instead of its legs, dispatching all comers.

So why doesn’t it seem more stirring?

Their game, once so fluid, has degenerated. Suddenly, they’re the Cleveland Cavaliers, boring prime-time television viewers with 70-point efforts.

Their future is murky. Coach Phil Jackson is negotiating with other teams--he’s still mulling Orlando’s gigantic $30-million offer--considering sitting out a year and pursuing his ongoing battle of wills with General Manager Jerry Krause, the surrogate for owner Jerry Reinsdorf.

For his part, Reinsdorf is publicly entertaining the possibility of letting everyone go--Jackson, Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman--even if they win a title.

Their snits are still world-class. Having just been fined $25,000 for ducking the press during the Atlanta series, the players did it again in this series and were fined $50,000.

Not that it made a big impression on them.

“I don’t care about the fine,” Jordan said. “It’s not coming out of my pocket. Whatever happened to free speech? We don’t have to talk, do we?”

You don’t have to ask what happened to biting the hand that feeds them, either. To a man, the Bulls loathe the paparazzi-like frenzy of the Chicago media but help themselves with both hands to the accompanying benefits, commercials and appearance fees that are available to even the most humble of them.

Not that they need a cause, because Jordan has been staging postseason media boycotts through the ‘90s, but the Chicago Tribune reported this one was designed to support Jackson and embarrass Reinsdorf.

In fact, it was Jackson who taught Jordan that mandatory interviews constituted a challenge to players’ constitutional rights.

Lining up opposite Jackson and Jordan, as in all other recent matters, is Krause.

“We’ve got to be better with the media,” Krause said. “We deserved the fine.

“We screwed up. The players have been warned, and I hope it never happens again. It’s not pleasing to me to get fined.”

The whole mess overflows with irony. Krause as defender of the media? No GM in the league is more hostile to the process and on worse terms with reporters.

Jackson as media victim? He may be given to what he once accused Pat Riley of--”a little us against them”--but is usually polite, discharging his public obligations dutifully, if not exuberantly.

At the moment, the Chicago Sun-Times is running a feature with a “Save Phil” logo, in which it advises readers:

” . . . Jackson has become a part of Chicago basketball lore. Write and tell him how Chicago feels about him. The Sun-Times will make sure he and the Bulls management get the message.”

Of course, in the Bulls-ocracy that Chicago has become, excess is the norm.

In a radio spot, the news and sports anchors for WBBM-TV, the local CBS outlet, note that, while they’re objective reporters, they’re unabashed Bulls fans--”since it’s a fact the Bulls are the greatest team in basketball.” In the city that just went to war over the hiring of tabloid talk-show host Jerry Springer, this cheerleading goes unchallenged.

The Sun-Times just did a 25-inch feature on a man named Sam Rainzulla. He parks the Bulls’ cars at United Center.

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Of course, it has been loony in Chicago through the ‘90s, but there used to be a payoff on the court.

In an age when everyone else ran plodding, static, inside-outside offenses, the Bulls’ triangle offense kept everyone in motion, defenses off-balance and fans entertained.

Other coaches sneered that Jordan guy helped some, but the first season after he retired, the Bulls won a surprising 55 games. In the playoffs, the triangle spread out Riley’s New York Knicks, took them to seven games and might even have beaten them were it not for Hue Hollins’ famous call.

Now the triangle still flows, but the shots don’t fall.

Jackson hates being asked about being “vulnerable” so much, he calls it “the V word.” If cornered, he will concede this team is struggling, noting it did the same thing last spring, that all teams are vulnerable in the playoffs, etc.

In fact, the Bulls are vulnerable because they depend on such a high level of performance from Jordan, who looks tired--showing the toll of those 141-23 seasons?--and is now only intermittently legendary.

A 38% three-point shooter during the season, he is three for 28 in the playoffs and his midrange game, which is usually the next thing to automatic, has suffered too.

Some nights, he gets close enough to the hoop to shoot 15 for 31, as he did in Game 1.

Other nights, he sits back and tries to get teammates involved, only to find he can’t get himself involved, and goes four for 15, as he did in Game 2.

Pippen, who has so often been a burden in the playoffs, is playing well this spring, but the reserves are not, especially Toni Kukoc, still bothered by his sore foot, one for 11 in this series.

After Riley’s reserves outscored his, 30-7, in Game 1, Jackson challenged his subs publicly.

In Game 2, the Heat reserves got them again, 20-9, and Jackson was asked what he could do now.

“Maybe don’t let them play the next game,” he mused. “Maybe just play the starters 48 minutes.”

He was just kidding, folks, or they’d better have the ambulances ready. The elderly Bulls, with Jordan (34), Pippen (31), Rodman (36) and Ron Harper (33), look tired enough.

After their embarrassing 75-68 victory in Game 2, the lowest playoff total since the advent of the shot clock in 1955, Jackson suggested physical Heat defenders wouldn’t let them run.

Jordan, however, had another story.

“We’ve got to play a half-court game, anyway,” Jordan said. “We’re old already from what people have said. . . .

“We’ve been in control of the tempo, I must admit. And we’d rather play a slow game.”

They’ve done that, all right, in another dismaying suggestion of how much the NBA game has slowed.

In their storied 1992 seven-game series against Riley’s first Knick team, before the league put teeth in the anti-violence rules, when John Starks neck-tied Pippen on a drive to the hoop and Xavier McDaniel terrorized him for two weeks, the Bulls still averaged 91 points.

In this series, under the new anti-thug, no-hand-check rules, with a closer three-point line, and against this smaller, milder version of a Riley team, the Bulls are averaging 79.5 points.

Of course, your normal team would have been destroyed long ago by the distractions, undercurrents and back-biting even before its players reached the Bulls’ august ages.

Even if the most interesting struggle this postseason is the intramural one between the Bulls, and the games make lawn tennis look exciting, the wonder continues.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Chateau Le Bulls (1996-97)

Blend Contains:

2% Luc Longley

4% Ron Harper

10% Dennis Rodman

33% Scottie Pippen

51% Michael Jordan

Contains sulfates