Every fan of the Chicago Bulls who was around for the Michael Jordan era will defend that team to the death.
They dominated the era behind the best player of all time, winning six titles along the way.
But they also left one of the biggest “what ifs” in the history of the NBA when Michael Jordan left the league for a season and a half in between their two three-peats, leaving two titles up for grabs that the Houston Rockets snatched.
If you asked most Bulls fans, those titles could and should have belonged to Chicago, as Jordan was in his prime and no one was going to stop him except himself, when he decided to play baseball for a season after his father was tragically murdered.
It’s a story that doesn’t get enough attention in the grand narrative of Jordan’s career, but imagine if LeBron James were to suffer a tragedy and then decide to play a different pro sport for a year in his prime. The Internet would have exploded.
The Bulls would have had a chance to win eight titles in a row and secure themselves as the greatest NBA team of all time, but one analyst thinks it never would have happened.
Is Kenny Smith right about Michael Jordan’s Bulls?
Analyst and two-time NBA champion Kenny Smith thinks it wouldn’t have mattered if Jordan was in the league or not during Houston’s titles and that the Rockets would have won anyway.
In fact, he said they would have “smacked” Jordan’s Bulls in that era, and to be fair, he might have a point:
“The reason I thought we would’ve beat them is because they were too small for us. There was no Horace Grant. Dennis Rodman wasn’t there yet. So who’s going to guard Dream? No. Impossible. No way, no how. We would’ve beaten the Michael Jordan Bulls because they were too little.”
It’s a fair claim, as the Bulls would have been trying to stop Hakeem Olajuwon, one of the greatest centers of all time in his prime with a combination of Luc Longley, Bill Cartright Bill Wennington and Will Perdue, a group that was mostly used to foul Shaq.
One thing that is true is that the Bulls never beat the dominant centers of the era. Here are the centers they faced in their six NBA Finals:
-Elden Campbell
-Vlade Divac
-Kevin Duckworth
-Oliver Miller
-Mark West
-Frank Brickowski
-Greg Ostertag
There’s no Shaq on that list, no Hakeem.
The Bulls can only play the opponent that gets there, but you do have to wonder how they would have matched up with Hakeem in those years, as the Bulls weren’t able to get by either Patrick Ewing or Shaq.
But that was without MJ, and when it comes to Jordan and his will to win, you can’t just assume anything. I agree with Smith that there would have been matchup problems for the Bulls with Hakeem but those same problems would have existed for Houston and Michael Jordan.
Jordan did have a losing record against the Rockets overall in his career, one of the few teams for which that is true.
Kenny Smith could be right, we’ll never know, but it’s wild for anyone to say any team would have “smacked” Michael Jordan in his prime.