It is impossible to watch the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls without viewing them within the context of the contemporary Warriors surpassing their historic 10-loss season. It’s only natural to compare the two teams, and for the virtual entirety of the Bulls’ tenth loss of the season, home against the Indiana Pacers—the only…
Maybe it started when they named the team after a dinosaur in a Steven Spielberg movie, or when the first player they ever drafted refused to report, or when the team’s greatest player left the country to attend his college graduation on the morning of the biggest game in franchise history. But if you believe in that…
Over the past 20 years basketball has evolved from a sport based around throwing the ball to brutes in the post into one based around flighty sprites flinging three-pointers from ever-increasing distances. But in watching a Bulls-Knicks game from 1996, it was illuminating to understand how this actually happened. That…
Michael Jordan made me hate basketball. That’s not supposed to be the effect of one of the greatest players of all time, not if he plays for your team or you’re a connoisseur of the sport. But for me, a young sports fan in South Florida who sort of understood basketball, I looked at Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and…
I’m a sucker for those moments when athletes lose themselves a little bit. When Jose Bautista gets mad at baseball and then throws a bat into baseball’s face; when Rajon Rondo realizes it’s him against the world and still asks LeBron James to come get some; when Baron Davis decides that the only appropriate thing to…
Children don’t pick their heroes, they gravitate to them. This youthful ignorance is blissful insofar as it frees one to feel that magnetic pull without questioning why it exists in the first place. The Jordan-era Chicago Bulls thus became the team of my childhood without any real reason beyond the media-fêted,…
The Indiana Pacers were a pretty, pretty basketball team. Do people know that now? It all came back at once, watching the bleary video of them facing the Bulls on Boxing Day of 1995. The in-game graphics reminded viewers that the Pacers had won the Central Division the year before—Michael Jordan’s baseball-shortened…
By November 26, 1995, everybody already knew the 10-1 Chicago Bulls were very good; nobody knew they were the best team in NBA history just yet. Michael Jordan was in his first full season back from retirement, the Bulls had gone down meekly in the playoffs to the young Orlando Magic the season before, and newly…
“It’s a nice number, 72-10. It rings well.” - Phil Jackson
