Bulls Fans Need New Nostalgia
Unfortunately for younger Bulls fans, nostalgia season is never over.
You deserve more than an old fan’s nostalgia.
Unfortunately for you, nostalgia season is never over. The high season? Sure, the high season ends. It starts April 24, picks up at Memorial Day weekend and runs to June 20. The peak of high season is June 14, the day of the ‘92 comeback and The Last Shot. You weren’t around for those. Not even that second one.
Think of it: You’ve been a Bulls fan for two decades and you weren’t even around for that second one.
So the high season is over. But as we’ve learned, 90s Bulls nostalgia is always in season. An MJ anniversary? In season. An MJ non-anniversary? What the hell, in season. A fake, new day on Feb. 3, 2023, that folks called “2–3, 23” and hence “Michael Jordan Day”? Won’t lie: I participated! “MJ Mondays.” Podcast fodder. Endless streams of segments in today’s grating, national debate shows. 90s Bulls nostalgia is like the Three Dobermans: relentless.
But you don’t want to hear about that anymore. I wouldn’t either if I were you. For me, it’s a different story. I will never stop talking about the 90s Bulls. You might have noticed I’ve fashioned a significant portion of my career on them.
I’m working on my Bulls book, “6 Rings,” collecting stories from everyone who touched the dynasty, including fans. We were all given a life-changing experience that lasts forever.
And yet, in 2023, the 90s Bulls are a VR headset. The actual Bulls are what happens when you take off the goggles. The 90s Bulls were the party of a lifetime. The actual Bulls are a quarter-century hangover. In the world of the 90s Bulls, the champagne flows annually. In the world of the actual Bulls, you spend draft day 2023 wondering if the Bulls will trade into the draft, waiting patiently until at last they add… a second rounder.
In the 90s, sometimes we didn’t have a first-round pick either. I mean, we had one, but we decided, nah, this group’s all set. You can go now. After the first championship, we drafted Mark Randall, a power forward out of Kansas. Waived him in December. The next year we drafted another power forward, Byron Houston, and traded him before he ever wore the red-and-black. Our next three first round picks were all power forwards too, and they stuck around for various lengths. Two of them even won rings.
Then came 1996, and the most extreme version of the “Yeah, we’re all set here” draft technique came after 72–10 and ring #4. With the final pick of the first round, we drafted UConn center Travis Knight and released him 17 days later in lieu of offering him a contract. No matter. All we did without him was win 69 games and our 5th championship.
That was once the expectation. For five magical years, Bulls fans began the basketball season thinking, “I root for the best team in the NBA,” and ended the season thinking, “I root for the best team in the NBA!” Even in 1991, we began the season, at worst, thinking, “This could be the year.” From June 12, 1991 to June 14, 1998, Bulls fans were treated with six nights where we saw the breadth of our domain and wept, for there were no more teams to conquer.
Until next season, that is.
But one day, next season didn’t come. In a mere 10 days during the first month of 1999, the Bulls punctured their ball and watched the air go rushing out — Jerry Krause, the man walking the plank while thinking it a platform, Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the boat who also owned another boat. For the next six years, though we walked the desert as the stars of our greatest glory sparkled in other skies, our bellies were full with the championships of days only recently gone by.
The franchise returned to the playoffs in 2005 — one of my favorite Chicago sports seasons of any team — made it again in 2006, reached the second round in 2007, had a deeply frustrating 2008 season that brought us a surprising lottery win and the gift of gifts: Chicago’s own Derrick Rose.
By this time, if you were a Bulls fan who was born the year of our first rebuild, you were turning eight. When I was eight, the 1990 Eastern Conference Finals became my first sports heartbreak. If you’re old enough for sports heartbreak, you’re old enough to know why sports matter.
So I imagine that you, an eight-year-old Bulls fan in the summer of 2008, knew that it was a pretty big deal to have the #1 overall pick, and to have it with several players who so recently were a rising playoff team. Derrick was better than advertised. Dragged us to the playoffs as a rookie. Won Rookie of the Year. Helped take the defending champs to seven games. Dragged us to the playoffs again in year 2, making his first All-Star team. Lost to the team with the best player in the world.
And then came the summer of 2010, and here is where you might have noticed that all those championships you read about might not be coming back.
“I think the biggest question (about the Bulls) that you think about has to be loyalty,” said Dwyane Wade in May of 2010, as he and his future teammates LeBron James and Chris Bosh were in the process of choosing their next team. “I see Michael Jordan is not there, Scottie Pippen is not there. … You know, these guys are not a part (of the franchise). That is probably one of the biggest things for me, because I am a very loyal person.”
That sentiment represented, if not the final nail in the dynasty, then certainly the biggest nail. Here was an Illinois-native and childhood Bulls fan with a chance to continue his basketball journey for his hometown team, and he passed. Yes, there were great reasons to stay in Miami, but Wade didn’t simply choose the Heat. He rejected the Bulls.
And while Derrick Rose took a lot of heat for not going harder in recruiting Wade and LeBron, years later we learned via Ric Bucher that during the Bulls free agency meeting with LeBron, though Reinsdorf seemed hopeful that his Bulls could sign James, he also gave James a piece of advice that Bulls fans were none-too-pleased to hear.
“I told him he should stay in Cleveland,” Reinsdorf said. On Twitter, I asked Bucher to clarify whether Reinsdorf spoke in jest.
“Jerry told me he believes the league is better served when players stay with their teams,” Bucher wrote back. “It wasn’t said in jest.”
Here was a franchise flashpoint if ever there was one, a time when our beloved Bulls could have cashed in on all they built in the 90s, and instead we’ve got the hometown guy saying the team isn’t loyal to its biggest stars while the team owner tells the opposing star to be loyal to his team. Meanwhile, Wade’s Heat lapped us, reaching six Finals since our last, winning two titles, and doing what we never did: using the stars of one generation to lay the groundwork for the next.
The irony is that Jerry Reinsdorf is, in many ways, incredibly loyal. As I wrote in 2018:
He hooked up Pippen ($67.2 million over 5 years), Longley ($30 million over 5) and Kerr ($11 million over 5) with lucrative sign-and-trades in January of 1999 that vastly increased their salaries despite getting barely anything of value for them. In the post-dynasty world, he spent heavily on extensions or long-term deals on Derrick Rose ($94.8 million over 5), Luol Deng ($71m/6), Joakim Noah ($60m/5) and Kirk Hinrich ($47.5m/5).
I continued, noting that Reinsdorf has “also been spectacularly loyal to many retired players.” Those include the myriad guys to whom he’s given jobs (front office, coaches, broadcasters, scouts, ambassadors). It also includes generous offers to players whose catastrophic health issues threatened to end their careers, or at least their time with the Bulls. For Jay Williams, Reinsdorf offered a $3 million settlement after Williams effectively ended his career with a motorcycle accident following his rookie season.
“We’re obviously extremely grateful to Jerry Reinsdorf,” Bill Duffy, Williams’ agent, said as the buyout was being finalized. “He has done something that he is not obligated to do, which basically is to give Jay quite a handsome settlement.”
Two years later, for Eddy Curry, Reinsdorf asked Curry to take a genetic test for a possible heart condition, one that ended his 2005 playoff season early; if Curry failed the test, Reinsdorf said the Bulls would pay him $400,000 a year for 50 years to make up for lost NBA income. That would be $20 million through 2055.
Lastly, there is the loyalty Reinsdorf showed Krause. That last one confounds me to this day. I asked Sam Smith about it in 2020, seeking clarification as to why Reinsdorf would choose loyalty to Krause over loyalty to Jordan. Sam found my question comical.
“If you’re the CEO of the most successful company in the world, why should you be fired?” he said. “In effect, Jerry Krause was the CEO of the most successful basketball team in the world. Whether he was liked by his employees or not is irrelevant. He is producing the highest level of production for his equity owners, the board of directors, whatever. They keep that person. You don’t lose your job if your company is successful.”
I get all of that. I do. But the fact remains that the Bulls of the 90s were a source of seemingly unlimited goodwill and one of the strongest brands in American culture, all of which could have been parlayed into the next Bulls championship era, perhaps even with Michael Jordan recruiting the next generation of Bulls legends the way Magic Johnson did for the Lakers or Dwyane Wade does for the Heat.
Instead, we lost out on LeBron, Wade and Bosh, Miami knocked us out of the playoffs twice in four years while they won two titles, our superstar was felled by the cruelest injury and eventually traded long before his 30th birthday. We struggled for a year, made the playoffs the next and then traded the best player on that team, too, a Chicago-esque star in Jimmy Butler who made two teams more successful before settling in on, yet again, Miami, welcomed by, of course, Dwyane Wade.
We bottomed out for a few years, hosting the All-Star Game while the castle was burning. We rebounded, built a solid playoff team and saw it crumble in short order.
All that remains are the memories.
Strike that: All that remains are my memories. And little good those are to you.
This is all pretty simple. I’m not going to stop talking about the 90s Bulls. (Or the ’85 Bears, for that matter.) No one should. When I tell you that it was incredible… THAT SHIT WAS INCREDIBLE! That team was unlike anything I’ve experienced as a fan, and really, as a citizen of the greater Chicagoland area. I wish you had been there.
And you could be one day, if only this club could crack the code. I can pick apart the year-by-year reasons that championship #7 eludes us. I can speculate on the connection between how the dynasty ended and how the next dynasty never even began. I can ruminate on the maddening twist that the 90s titles are still helping the franchise make bank.
But in the end, what I really want is for you to have your own nostalgia.
That starts with Jerry Reinsdorf. Folks love to point out that, yes yes, Jerry Krause brought in everyone but Jordan. That is true. But that’s no small feat. Krause acquired the greatest true #2 man in NBA history, and rescued arguably the greatest head coach ever from the CBA. He did so because Krause was a Red Holzman devotee and Phil Jackson was a Holzman acolyte who played for, and studied under, the man himself.
And why did Reinsdorf hire Krause? The same reason! Theirs was a shared devotion to Red Holzman, the coach who guided the champion New York Knicks of the early 1970s. Reinsdorf rooted for a Holzman team, Krause competed against Holzman as scouts, and Phil played for him. On March 26, 1985, Reinsdorf hired Krause as Bulls GM and described the type of Bulls team he wanted to build:
“An unselfish team, one that plays team defense, that knows its roles, that moves without the ball. A totally unselfish team, a team that hits the open man. A team that will play Red Holzman basketball.”
The point here is that Jerry Reinsdorf had a vision. He knew what he wanted and he made it happen. He gave this city six championships, and as someone who came of age as a fan during that era, I will always have a soft spot for The Chairman. I will always appreciate Jerry Reinsdorf. I think you can understand that.
But I hope Bulls fans of my age can understand why you will not. The Bulls were your birthright, and your birthright was squandered. Jerry didn’t sell it to anyone in particular, and he didn’t get much for it. He just made one calculation after another that left it ruptured and flooding and let the rest leak to a slow drip. What was is no more.
And that’s heartbreaking. Because you would love a championship Bulls team. You deserve one. You’ve earned one. And here on what someone will surely claim is “Michael Jordan Day” (6.23.23), I don’t know when the next one’s coming.
Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s sports historian, Bears historian at Windy City Gridiron, and author of the forthcoming “6 Rings: The Bulls, The City, and the Dynasty that Changed the Game.” His newsletter, “A Shot on Ehlo,” brings readers inside the making of the book, with original interviews, research and essays. Sign up now, and say hey at @readjack.
