Chicago Bulls great Scottie Pippen recently commented that the team could have won at least two more championships if they had stayed together. Let’s take a look and see if that was probable.
The Chicago Bulls of the nineties were considered one of the best if not the best team in NBA history. The core of the team was made up of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
In a period of eight years the Bulls won six championships. Most people agree that if Michael had not retired to play baseball that they could have won eight straight.
Instead they won three in a row twice. During the first three-peat Jordan and Pippen were complimented by Horace Grant. The remainder of the team was built around them.
The second time around, Grant was replaced at power forward by Dennis Rodman. That team not only won three more championships but also won a then record 72 games during the 1995-96 season. Jordan, Pippen and Rodman are all members of the Basketball Hall of Fame.
This past week ESPN’s Rachel Nicoles, host of “The Jump” welcomed Pippen and Rodman on the show. At one point, Pippen said that if the team would have stuck together, they probably would have won two more, if not three, championships.
The Bulls won 6 titles in 8 years...and then broke up. I asked Pippen & Rodman what would have happened if they'd stayed together even just one more season - especially since that next season was shortened by the lockout. Scottie: "we probably would have gone 50-0." https://t.co/Q3asqFSKU8
— Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) September 11, 2019
For years the late Jerry Krause, who was the general manager credited with putting the championship teams together, was criticized for wanting to take the team in a new direction. Pippen’s biggest assumption is that their old legs could have made it through the next strike shortened 1998-99 season and beyond. He claims the competition was just as old as them.
That may be true for the Utah Jazz who they had just defeated two years in a row. Karl Malone and John Stockton, the all-time NBA assist leader, were entering the latter ends of their careers and were older than Pippen. They had been beaten badly the prior two years by the Bulls and did not even make the Finals together again.
As much as we may want to believe Pippen though, besides the Jazz, here are three teams that would have made those next two championships really difficult to achieve. Each team also had a core consisting of at least two players that have been inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame.