De-Michaelization and all. Armstrong as he sits on the bench. We started on page 95, remember. This is why we made due without Woj bombs back in Because The Jordan Rules was the mother of all Woj bombs. Sam Smith was an odd guy to write a classic sports book. David Axelrod — the Tribune columnist turned Obama political guru — said Smith favored saddle shoes like the ones Archie Andrews wore. Smith, who was from Brooklyn, was more clear-eyed.
If his writing occasionally groaned under the strain of the beat — in The Jordan Rules , he compared the Bulls to the defenders of the Alamo, General Sherman, and the British army during the Revolutionary War — he had a knack for finding the killer detail. Second, it created the template for the literate, feverishly reported "season inside.
With only a touch of irony, Playboy called Jordan "the quintessential gentleman, consummate sportsman, clean-living family man and modest, down-to-earth levitating demigod. The real Jordan, Smith found, was thornier, less smiley. In the playoffs against the Pistons, Scottie Pippen had been leveled by a migraine headache before Game 7 — a humiliating event for a young player.
The next fall, forward Stacey King showed up at training camp overweight. The Bulls nicknamed him "Doughboy. Jordan continued: "Big guy like that and he gets one rebound.
Stiiiiill going: "Big, fat guy. One rebound in three games. Power forward. Maybe they should call it powerless forward. King finally snapped. Bill Cartwright was a center whose elbows the Bulls compared to Scud missiles: They were lethal but you never knew exactly where they were going to land. Then, during the —90 season, he ordered Bulls players not to pass the ball to Cartwright late in games.
Cartwright told Jordan that if he heard of a similar ukase , Jordan would "never play basketball again. It described the privileges that fame had conferred on Jordan — the airs His Airness could put on. So what, right? In one game, Jordan torched the Rockets for 34 points despite having a cold — one of the numerous times he was lauded for playing hurt. Jordan still put up big individual numbers in each of those series, but the Pistons were able to contain him and the Bulls in a way no other team in the league could at the time.
To put the success they had against him into perspective, if you look at which players won the most games against Jordan in his career regular season and playoffs combined , the first seven names on the list are players from those Pistons teams, headlined by Bill Laimbeer and Isiah Thomas.
The way the Pistons did it was by implementing what has become known as "The Jordan Rules," which is a set of principles devised by former Pistons head coach Chuck Daly after Jordan dropped 59 points on the Pistons in the lead-up to the NBA Playoffs.
The general idea was to limit Jordan the best they could by throwing different looks at him and being physical with him, all while daring his teammates to beat them. It began with Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman, who served as Detroit's primary defenders on Jordan, and extended to the likes of Laimbeer, John Salley and Rick Mahorn, who were tasked with doubling Jordan and protecting the paint against him.
Remember, this was at a time where hand checking was still legal. When a team wants to sign multiple stars today, it simply jettisons its role players, who are typically on short contracts.
Doing so becomes significantly harder when those role players are on six- and seven-year deals. There was no stretch provision at this point in history either. If a team wanted to clear cap space, trading contracts was the only way to do so. And finally, there's the mental toll of all of this.
Teams were aware of all these realities. They knew that clearing cap space would require convincing stars to take pay cuts, hoping other stars didn't extend their contracts, and spending years either dumping their bad contracts or waiting for them to expire. It was such a perilous and unpredictable track that no team truly attempted it until the Orlando Magic. Using the methods described above made it easier to aim lower.
Getting and retain role players was so simple that aiming for stars just wasn't appealing. To an extent, this was by design. Most of the past methods of superteam formation had been eliminated by league-intervention. Superteams were plentiful in the s, and they are plentiful now.
They just happened to be built in entirely different ways. Broadly speaking, most of the best teams of that decade stacked the deck using methods that are now illegal. One such practice involves an owner so infamous he now has a rule named after him. Ted Stepien had no interest in rebuilding when he took over the Cleveland Cavaliers. He wanted a playoff team immediately, so he traded all of his draft picks for veteran help. That isn't an exaggeration. The Cavaliers did not keep a single one of their first-round picks during Stepien's entire tenure.
Another team had their pick every year from , and each selection was in the top nine. In , that pick went to the Lakers. It was No. They used it to select James Worthy. Nowadays, this would be impossible because of the aptly-named Stepien Rule. It prevents teams from trading first-round picks in consecutive years. The Philadelphia 76ers were able to take advantage of a different sort of desperation.
This is a fairly standard expansion and relocation clause that still exists in many sports today. The problem was that the Nets couldn't afford it, so they sold Julius Erving to the 76ers in order to pay off the Knicks. Today, any new ownership group would be vetted. It would have to be financially stable enough to support the franchise, and even if it wasn't, the sale of players for cash is now illegal.
That it wasn't then allowed the 76ers to steal a Hall of Famer. And then we have the Boston Celtics. Rather than exploit the trade market, they turned to the NBA Draft. With the No. The only problem? Bird hadn't entered the draft. He remained in school at Indiana State, but the Celtics were able to retain his rights and sign him a year later, after he graduated. As with practically every other rule we've discussed, this one was changed as well.
Players cannot be drafted and still return to college anymore. It is the second rule mentioned in this story named after Bird. The above moves were a staple of the s. When a team exploited a rule to gain an unfair competitive advantage, the NBA changed that rule to protect the balance of the sport.
By the time Jordan starting winning, the old methods of combating a team as dominant as the Bulls were all gone, yet the new ones that would eventually be concocted weren't yet possible. Delving into the archives of pop culture history, "Remember When? Remember when Michael Jordan stepped on court in pair of red and black sneakers, broke the NBA's rules and kicked off the multibillion-dollar celebrity-endorsed footwear industry? Jordan was already a phenomenon when he skipped senior year at the University of North Carolina to be drafted by the Chicago Bulls in Never before had a rookie had a shoe named after them.
When year-old Jordan stepped on court for the Chicago Bulls in a preseason game against the New York Knicks in October , the rookie's trainers -- a black and red combo that the player later dubbed "the Devil's colors" -- caught the attention of the NBA's top man, commissioner David Stern.
Credit: Andrew D. Nike still has a framed letter from the NBA explaining that the association's "rules and procedures" prohibited Jordan's shoes.
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