Texas Two Step: An Alternate NBA History (NBA2K20)

[trekfan]

Quote: Originally Posted by studbucket

Fascinating stuff Trek. I can tell you are basing this on historical events (Olajuwan did ask for a trade), which is making me wonder what Eastern team has notable problems in 1990ish. The Celtics had injury issues, Jordan had personality issues (but not sure this makes the cut), and the Sixers had Barkley issues, but maybe trading Hakeem and pairing him with Barkley makes them a contender - because they weren't a great team outside of Charles.

There were a number of interesting possibilities on where I should send Hakeem. I had a lot of trade packages to consider for multiple contender teams, but I eventually settled on one that provided good value back plus a very intriguing storyline (which just turned out to be even more intriguing as the seasons went on).



Season 1 really, really took some turns I didn't expect and just had a number of games that took this little side project -- which had been just a kind of "what if" experiment I wasn't really planning on doing much with -- and turned it into a classic dynasty. It had games that, if they had occurred in real life, would have turned an entire generation into hardcore fans of the team.

[trekfan]

Ch. 4

They say a picture is worth a thousand words — the deal struck by the Houston Rockets might have generated a million (and counting).



It was a deal few in the NBA thought possible — the Bulls, Jordan’s team, grabbing Hakeem Olajuwon? The Bulls, run by Jerry Krause, giving up prized players Pippen and Grant? The Bulls, owned by Jerry Reinsdorf, paying both Jordan and Olajuwon?

“Game-changer, game-breaker, that was the nature of this trade,” said NBA columnist Sam Gray. “No one in the league had it happening. Hakeem was seen as just too valuable to be sent away for the likes of Pippen and Grant then … especially after what happened in the playoffs.”

Ah, yes, the playoffs — where Michael Jordan and the Bulls … lost to Cleveland? In the first round? In a sweep?

“Embarrassed and tired of it,” Jordan said after the last game in that series. Jordan had, as usual, performed brilliantly — 31.0 PPG, 7.2 RPG, 5.5 APG, on over 50% shooting from the field and another 36% from deep. Michael Jordan was, by all accounts, not the problem. So if the Bulls lost and Jordan wasn’t the problem … well, that only left the rest of the team.

And in the pecking order of the Bulls, the next two players up were Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant. A quick look at the stats show that Pippen, who made his first all star team in 1990, only put up 14.3 PPG in the playoffs on middling efficiency — he scored 19.1 PPG in the regular season. Grant went from 14.5 PPG in the regular season to 11.3 PPG in the postseason and saw his shooting percentages drop noticeably.

Michael Jordan was well-aware of this. While he was putting up his numbers and commanding double and triple teams, Pippen and Grant weren’t converting open shots. The Bulls lost Game 1 by a score 125-111, never leading. They lost Game 2 by a score of 109-104, having … never led. The Bulls, in Game 3, were finally home in Chicago and the fans rallied around their team — a brilliant 1st quarter had the Bulls leading 30-21, their first lead in the whole series, and you could feel the momentum shifting.

And then Michael Jordan took a quick rest on the bench early in the 2nd quarter, Pippen was allowed to run the floor, and the Bulls got shellacked 44-21 before the half mercifully ended. They never led again and lost 129-116 in one of the most deflating playoff defeats of Jordan’s career.

Jordan didn’t hide his displeasure; he unleashed it. In a scathing post-game press conference, Michael Jordan declared that he “couldn’t score sixty every night” and that he “needed help, someone to step up” and that “it takes a team to win a title, not a collection of high draft picks and hope.”

Jordan was clearly unhappy and he had painted a target on the backs of every member of his team and his front office; the biggest targets were on the backs of Pippen, Grant, and Jerry Krause.

“He was angry, angrier than I’d ever seen him,” recalled Chicago Sun-Times columnist Greg Bender. “That press conference was a man releasing steam as a last-ditch effort to avoid exploding. He had played his heart out and the team failed him.”

Bender — and Jordan — weren’t alone in that analysis. Virtually the entire city of Chicago agreed that the Bulls, as constructed, were flawed; sports radio shows had caller after caller lambasting Pippen, Grant, and the man who selected them, Jerry Krause. The local papers, big and small, all had some variation of “Jordan has no help” across their sports pages immediately after the series.

If you were in the city of Chicago, not named Michael Jordan, and were a Chicago Bull, your life was — at the very least — unpleasant following that playoff loss. If you were named Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, or Jerry Krause, your life was probably hell.

Bulls coach Phil Jackson, in his first year on the job, wasn’t happy that Jordan had gone to the press to express his grievances, but he understood. “Great players demand greatness,” Jackson would later say. “Michael was a great player and he was surrounded by other players who weren’t on his level; he knew this, he was aware of this, but after that Cleveland series he just didn’t have the patience to contain it anymore. He was emotional and those emotions dictated his actions.”

Jackson, later known as “The Zen Master,” had spent the season trying — and somewhat succeeding — at teaching his players the triangle offense and teaching them how to play with one another. The Cleveland series had proven to be a test that the Bulls weren’t ready to pass, however; Cleveland was a well-oiled machine while Chicago was trying to reinvent their own wheel.

The triangle was effective during the regular season, but the playoffs were a different beast. “The pressure made our discipline break down, Michael included,” Jackson recalled. “A lot of one on one, isolation ball … not winning plays. Too much dribbling and too little movement.”

Jackson may have been the only Bull who didn’t feel Jordan’s wrath, but that was cold comfort as the head coach of the team watched the city tear his players apart. The Detroit Pistons — longtime Bulls rivals — winning the title (and beating Cleveland in the ECF to do it) only made the sting worse.

Jerry Krause knew something had to be done. Krause was a big believer in both Pippen and Grant; these were two players he personally selected, two pieces of a puzzle he believed he nailed. But Jerry Krause could read and he could listen and he could watch … and all those things told him that Jordan didn’t believe in Pippen and Grant. Certainly, the city of Chicago didn’t.

And neither did Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls owner. In a rare edict from atop the mountain, Reinsdorf reached out to Krause and asked him to explore upgrades for the team; specifically, there was no one on the roster that was untouchable except Jordan.

On the face of it, this seemed preposterously obvious: of course anyone else on that team is expendable. But to Jerry Krause, the words may have well been engraved in stone and dropped on his head, because Krause hadn’t been willing to include Pippen or Grant in past trade discussions. They were his picks, his players, his guys … trading them would be tantamount to admitting a mistake, not only to the league, but to Jordan himself.

An entire book could be written about the relationship between Jordan and Krause, but the very simplified dynamic was this: Jerry Krause wanted Michael Jordan’s respect. Jordan didn’t give that freely, to anyone, and less so to a man he considered slovenly and a hindrance.

“It was a tough order to swallow for Krause,” said Bender. “He confided in me, years later, that he had written a long treatise on why trading Pippen and Grant was a terrible idea … he almost sent it, but then things happened in Houston.”

The Houston situation had been a lifeline for Krause, as finding takers for Pippen and Grant who were willing to part with assets Krause coveted was hard. Krause drove a hard bargain to pry his two prized picks away from him — it wasn’t crazy to wonder if Krause was purposefully trying to scuttle any trade just to save face, tell Reinsdorf he tried, and run it back next season when everyone had cooled down.

But when Hakeem Olajuwon hit the market, Krause couldn’t resist — here was a team run by a new owner, a completely inexperienced GM, and had an unhappy, star player, locked in on a contract that would keep him on his new team for at least three seasons. It was too delicious an opportunity to pass up, but it couldn’t be done in broad daylight — Krause wanted to keep his options open and his plausible deniability intact.

“The deal started off thanks to Krause reaching out not to Nate Hale, but to the team’s head trainer — Harvey Ross,” recalled Bender. “Ross was a guy who had worked with the Bulls during the 87-88 season, one of the best trainers and medical minds around, but an arrogant *uck. He and Michael got along best when the two were gambling, golfing, or hitting the town. Reinsdorf thought Ross was a bad influence on Jordan and got rid of him.”

Harvey Ross was essentially banished from the Bulls, and it was a banishment that, in Ross’ mind, was well-deserved. “Yeah, I was having too much fun,” Ross later admitted. “Me and Mike, we enjoyed ourselves a bit too much for guys who were at the top of their professions. Getting canned from the Bulls sucked *ss, but it also gave me time to look at myself hard. I realized I needed to do more work and have less play … I became a 50-50 guy. Well, maybe more a 60-40 guy, favoring play, but way better than my 80-20 years.”

Ross spent the next two years running his own private practice, catering to the best and brightest athletes the country had. He was comfortable there, but missed the challenges that came with the NBA — so when his old New York City roommate, Nate Hale, landed the Rockets job, Harvey was among the first people who called him.

“Harvey and I went way back and we were close,” recalled Nate Hale. “He was a like a brother … he helped me settle in and figure out who I was in New York when I got there in 1976.”

Ross took the job as the Rockets’ head trainer almost as soon as the Hale’s bought the team — and, in early July, 1990, got a phone call he never expected from Jerry Krause.

“Krause wasn’t a man who called just to chat about the *ucking weather,” Ross said. “When he rang me up, I knew it had be to be something major — and when he told me what his idea was, I realized just how crazy things were about to get.”

Ross took Krause’s initial idea to Nate Hale, who himself had been fielding less-than palatable offers for his superstar center. After a lengthy discussion between Ross and Hale, the GM of the Rockets called up the GM of the Bulls the next day with a counter offer. The two men haggled for nearly three days before finally arriving at the deal that shook the league.

“Krause came away from those negotiations impressed with Hale,” said Bender. “When Hale sent back that first offer and the idea to include a third team, Krause knew he was dealing with someone who may have been inexperienced, but definitely wasn’t dumb.”

The trade was received well in Chicago, not so much in Houston. Wrote Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Judge:

The trade breaks down as follows:

HOU received SF Scottie Pippen, PF Horace Grant, Chicago’s 1990 1st rounder, and Washington’s 1992 1st rounder.
CHI received C Hakeem Olajuwon, SF Buck Johnson, and Houston’s 1990 2nd rounder.
WAS received PG Sleepy Floyd.

What we’re looking at is nothing less than an undersell; Hakeem Olajuwon has to be worth more than this, doesn’t he? Two Jordan sidekicks and a couple of first rounders that probably won’t turn out to be anything. Unloading Floyd, a player who added 14.5 PPG and 10.8 APG as a starter, is just the icing on the cow-patty cake. The Hale family taking over the Rockets seemed like a life-raft for a struggling franchise, but more and more it looks like an anchor. Houston, we have a problem.


The local press in Houston wasn’t thrilled with the return, but the sentiments were split roughly 50-50; either the trade was an undersell or the trade made the best out of a bad situation. Some in Houston were done giving the benefit of the doubt to seemingly incompetent ownership, even if it was new ownership.

Hale expected the blowback. It wasn’t the superstar for superstar trade the league had expected, and it certainly looked like he had been hoodwinked in his first ever deal. “I had my doubts, too,” said Hale. “But I was swayed by Harvey, who spoke glowingly of Pippen and Grant — he knew these players from his brief time with the Bulls and Harvey wasn’t a man who guessed wrong often. Between that, looking at the market, and the chance to grab two good players and picks … I felt like I wouldn’t get a better deal.”

Jerry Krause had done it. He had gotten Michael Jordan, the biggest star in the league, a true superstar teammate and nabbed a solid replacement for Pippen in Buck Johnson. He could use free agency to fill in whatever holes remained and players would be lining up to join the team.

“Krause was thrilled with the deal — he knew that one of the reasons they lost the Cleveland series was because of how porous the paint was. Bill Cartwright just wasn’t good enough to keep Brad Daughtery away from the rim … they needed someone better. You weren’t getting much better than Hakeem,” said Bender.

With the trade done, Nate Hale wanted to talk to Pippen and let him know that the Houston Rockets would take care of him and put him in a position to succeed. One small problem:

No one knew where Scottie Pippen was.

[R1zzo23]

MJ and Hakeem?!? Together?!?!

[studbucket]

Amazing, what great writing, it had me hooked the whole article. This is cool and exciting and sets up in a fascinating way for both teams.

[trekfan]

Quote: Originally Posted by R1zzo23

MJ and Hakeem?!? Together?!?!

Oh yes, it's the Dream uniting with His Airness -- I was pretty damned hesitant to do it, BUT I wondered what would happen. Will they dominate the league? Are they as compatible in practice as they are in theory?



Will Pippen and Grant develop on Houston like they did IRL on the Bulls?



Lots of questions. It's turned out to be a really fun set up and triggers a seismic wave of changes in the NBA. It's gonna be fun.

Quote: Originally Posted by studbucket

Amazing, what great writing, it had me hooked the whole article. This is cool and exciting and sets up in a fascinating way for both teams.

Really glad you're enjoying this so far -- there's no real gameplay here, this is all the background information/character work, but its important stuff and adds a sense of depth as the seasons go along. It's gonna be fun.

[trekfan]

Ch. 5

Scottie Pippen has been called many things throughout his NBA career — he’s been recognized as supremely talented, one of the game’s best defenders, a player whom other players enjoy playing with. He’s also been called moody, a choker, and someone who shrinks in the spotlight. The opinions on Pippen are as wide-ranging as Pippen’s basketball skills but what can’t be argued is that Scottie Pippen was important.

He was important to the Bulls. He was important to his teammates, particularly Michael Jordan, and he was important to the city of Chicago. Pippen’s history prior to his NBA career is well known (and if you don’t know, this author highly encourages you to research it) but few knew at this time just how much Scottie Pippen was hurting.

It wasn’t just about the Cleveland series — though that was definitely a part of it — it was about everything else. The 1989-90 season hadn’t been kind to Pippen and what happened in the Cleveland playoff series seemed to be the universe shoving his bloodied, broken face, further into the dirt.

“I wasn’t in a good place,” Pippen admitted years after his career ended. “Mentally, emotionally, that season had been hard on me in ways few people knew … and I wanted it that way. I was trying to handle it quietly. I wanted to be strong.”

It began in the fall of 1989. Scottie Pippen and his wife, Karen McCollum, were not happy newly weds anymore. Married for just over a year, the couple already had one child (Scottie’s oldest, Antron) and their domestic life wasn’t peaceful. It was filled with fighting, it was filled with drama, and it wasn’t pleasant. Pippen looked forward to going on the road with his teammates because, at least there, he’d get a measure of peace — even if he had to put up with the road fans.

This, in of itself, is not an unusual position to find a professional athlete. Most pro players end up struggling in their first marriage and some end up in a divorce; it’s a necessary, sometimes vital lesson — life isn’t as easy as marrying, having children, having lots of money, and living in a great house. Television and film glorify these things, but the realities of life make that mixture of money and celebrity toxic to those unprepared for it.

Pippen and his wife weren’t prepared for it. The idea of divorce had been broached by both parties but neither was ready to give up just yet, especially with a young child at home.

The couple had a fine Christmas and a decent New Years, and when Pippen made the All-Star Game in February, they were ecstatic — but that weekend in Miami was not a good one for the NBA. David Stern’s death was a shock to everyone, but it hit Scottie Pippen harder than he expected it to.

“I was in my room, looked out the window at what all the noise was about, and saw Stern just lying there in the street … that image stuck with me. I had talked to him about two hours before, he was asking me if I wanted to join him for dinner, but I told him I already had plans,” said Pippen.

Pippen canceled those dinner plans, like many of the NBA players on site, and the weekend was forever marred by Stern’s death. That weekend in Miami was the weekend Pippen decided it was time to end it with his wife: he wasn’t happy and neither was she, and life was — as Stern’s death reminded everyone — very short.

“We both wanted it to work and wanted to try to make it work,” said Pippen. “I don’t blame either of us for any of it … we were too young when we got married and we really weren’t ready. I didn’t know how to balance my career with my home life, and she wasn’t prepared to deal with everything that came with being an NBA player’s wife. We were best apart.”

The divorce was amicable, but hard on their child. It turned out to be harder on Pippen than he expected, questioning throughout the rest of the season whether he had made the right decision; basketball became a refuge, an escape, but it soon turned into a house of horrors during the Cleveland series.

The divorce was finalized the day before the series started and Pippen’s mind wasn’t right from that point on.

“I wasn’t really there,” admitted Pippen. “I shouldn’t have been starting, I shouldn’t have been playing probably … I just wasn’t into it.”

When the series ended and Michael Jordan lit into his teammates, Scottie Pippen became an enemy of the people in Chicago. Already feeling guilty over the series and the divorce, the press peppering him with questions about what Jordan said — and what it meant for him — was just too much.

Pippen went back to his house in Chicago, packed some things, told his agent he was going home (and to let no one know that if he wanted to remain employed), and left Chicago six hours after the end of the Bulls’ season. Like a thief in the night, Scottie Pippen had stolen away and was going off the grid to try and find some space for himself.

Pippen was going home, back to Arkansas, and there in his old stomping grounds, Pippen committed himself to doing two things: first, staying in basketball shape. Second, disconnecting from anything to do with the NBA — he wanted to be left alone. With those simple directives in mind, Pippen began a much-needed sabbatical.

His agent, Jarrod “J-Dog” Mitchell, handled the drama in Chicago. Scottie Pippen became unavailable for interviews, unavailable for team functions, unavailable for virtually everything. The outside world assumed Pippen was hiding in his luxurious Chicago home, unwilling to face the music — the truth was, Pippen was no where near Chicago and had no idea what was going on.

Mitchell kept it that way. “He wanted to get away from it all, so I made sure it happened,” said Mitchell. “He was pretty clear he was willing to fire me if I screwed this up — I was his third agent at this point and he was my biggest client. My only client, actually.”

Mitchell wasn’t a very successful agent at this juncture. A former point guard, Mitchell assumed he’d play in the NBA one day but wasn’t drafted. He spent a few years playing overseas before coming back to the USA to become an agent. Except, Mitchell had no real experience — he took a job in a firm and was barely making enough to support his limited existence in his limited studio apartment. It was all depressing and not like Mitchell had imagined it.

At least until a chance meeting with Pippen in March of 1990. At a local Chicago establishment, Mitchell spotted Pippen at a table and took a chance to make his pitch. His mixture of humor, charm, and style (Mitchell spent more money on his clothes and jewelery than anything else) swayed Pippen; Scottie had a new contract coming up and his current agent had gotten nowhere on a big deal, so Mitchell got the job.

The job soon entailed more than a new contract, especially after the Cleveland series and then the lockout. Mitchell realized Pippen needed someone to watch his back while he got himself right, so that’s what Mitchell did — he was the wall that kept everyone out, even himself.

“I promised him I wouldn’t take his time with BS. He told me the only time I was allowed to call him was if I got him a new deal,” said Mitchell. Mitchell held true to that when the lockout occurred, he held true to that when the trade rumors started, but he faltered when the trade was made official. This, Mitchell surmised, was too big a deal not to call about.

The day the trade went through, Mitchell called the number his client gave him and found, much to his surprise, that the number was disconnected.

“I gave him my parents old number,” Pippen admitted. “It was a test, to see whether he would really not call — I knew as soon as he called the number and found it disconnected, he’d fly out to Arkansas and find me. The fact that he didn’t make that call for over two months impressed the hell out of me.”

Mitchell knew none of this and wasn’t just surprised; he was scared *hitless. “I thought he had gone and offed himself,” Mitchell said. “I was beside myself, losing my *hit, freaking the *uck out. Even now it makes me anxious … he was my only client, my big ticket and I had let him fly away, into the night, in a poor state of mind. He could have been dead for weeks and I wouldn’t have been the wiser and if the story got out about how I let it happen … my life would have been *ucked in so many ways.”

July 12th, 1990, saw Jarrod Mitchell fly to Hamburg, Arkansas, and begin a frantic search for his one and only client. Scottie Pippen was not hard to find. Mitchell found his client practicing at his old high school gym, a hot and humid place that made anyone sweat buckets.

Pippen was surprised to see him, flashed a big smile, and welcomed him to Arkansas. Mitchell, relieved beyond words, could only hug his very sweaty, very tall client. When Mitchell finally released Pippen from the embrace, he relayed the news of the trade.

Scottie Pippen couldn’t believe it. When he had left Chicago, he knew Michael Jordan was angry — that much was clear to everyone — but in no universe did Pippen play that badly in the Cleveland series. He didn’t play well, but he wasn’t putting up goose-eggs on the scoreboard. During the season he and Jordan — after the team practice — spent time practicing against each other, going one-on-one.

“Iron sharpening iron,” Pippen recalled. “We had some intense battles, just the two of us — we didn’t let press in, we didn’t let our teammates sit there and watch, we were there to do the work. We made each other better.”

Now, all that was over. Jordan had lit into him with the press and instead of cooling off, Pippen knew that Jordan had signed off on this deal. The Bulls front office wouldn’t have made this deal unless Jordan signed off on it. The divorce with his wife earlier in the year had been amicable, but this … this wasn’t that.

Pippen was angry and felt betrayed.

“From that moment on, I had one goal,” said Pippen. “I’d have it till the end of my career. I’d carry it with me every time I picked up a basketball.”

Pippen, informed of the Rockets attempt to contact him, left his old high school gym, found a phone, and dialed up Nate Hale. The conversation was short, but the message delivered has become NBA lore.

“He called me,” said Hale, “and told me, ‘I’m going to win a title before *ucking Jordan and I’m going to make him a fool.’ Those were his exact words.”

Pippen was now a Houston Rocket and, more than that, he was motivated to be more than what Michael Jordan, Jerry Krause, or the city of Chicago thought of him. He was ready to step out on his own and embrace a role few in the NBA believed he was ready for it.

Exit Scottie Pippen, Michael Jordan sidekick.

Enter Scottie Pippen, star of the Houston Rockets.

[studbucket]

Mitchell is a good agent, glad he kept Scottie's trust.

I love the format of this in a retrospective, telling stories like in a past news article format.

[trekfan]

Quote: Originally Posted by studbucket

Mitchell is a good agent, glad he kept Scottie's trust. I love the format of this in a retrospective, telling stories like in a past news article format.

Bless you sir, I really have enjoyed this retrospective look back format; one of the things I took away from Pearlman's incredible work is just how engaging this format is and how easy it is to take a sidetrack, explore something, and end up back on the main narrative.



And J-Dog Mitchell will earn himself some more clients in the future thanks to the way he handled Scottie's situation -- he's not on track to found a superstar agency, but his actions here impress stars in the future.