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Originally Posted by Dice |
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What about McHale? Who's going to lock him down? And then what about Parish? You say Longley? I don't think so. The 86 Celtics would give the 96 Bulls a serious run.
And I honestly think that the 87 Lakers would beat the 96 Bulls in a 7 game series. Magic and Worthy would be a problem for the Bulls defensively. Everybody would assume that Pippen would guard Magic because of how he played him in the 1991 Finals. Now, that would be good but you run the risk of having Jordan cover Worthy. Which is not what you want because in 1987 Worthy was in his prime and because he was bigger than Mike he would take him in the post and get Mike into foul trouble early. Now you can have Jordan guard Green but then you run the risk of giving up offensive rebounds because Green will beat Jordan to the boards. Now you could just play them straight up and you just give up on the mismatches at the PG(Magic vs Haprer) and C(Longley vs Jabbar) and hope you could win the SF matchup(Pippen vs Worthy), which would be the deciding factor.
On the other end, the Lakers obviously need to try and stop Jordan's scoring and Pippen's all round play. Jordan is going to win his matchup and Harper and Longley will loose theirs so they'll have to bank on the Pippen/Worthy matchup. Which will be close. Rodman will beat Green on the boards BUT Green , even as a young player back then, was savy on both sides of the ball. So the intangibles of Rodman and that of Green would also be brought to the table to decide.
As for the benches, Bulls win this one. Not by much but they win.
Now this is coming from a huge Bulls fan but I think that the Magic/Worthy problem is much more dangerous to the Bulls than the Jordan/Pippen problem for the Lakers. As I stated, the Pippen/Worthy matchup is the key and I think that can be won by Worthy. People forget that Worthy was a beast during that time. He was taking great defensive player at that time to school. I've seen great defensive players at that time, namely Kevin McHale and Rodney McCray, just get abused by Worthy.
I say the 1996 Bulls loose to the 1987 Lakers 4-2. And like I said, this is coming from a die hard Bulls fan.
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Defense wins championships and good defense overall was much better in 96 than 86 or 87... and the Bulls were one of the best defensive teams in the league, if not the best. The Showtime Lakers were far from a defensive team. I can't knock any of the one on one break downs, but as an overall team, I think the Lakers would need to put up 125 to 130 and I can see the Bulls stopping them from doing that. I don't see the Lakers holding the Bulls.