Home For Playoffs, Bulls Now Get to Play ‘What If?’

CHICAGO — The playoffs have begun, and while the Miami Heat and Indiana Pacers are chasing the Eastern Conference title, the Chicago Bulls sit home counting lottery picks.

But what if the Bulls hadn’t demolished their team after Michael Jordan retired?

What if they’d thrown a whole bunch of money at Scottie Pippen, Luc Longley, Steve Kerr and the rest of the gang and persuaded them to stay for one last go-around? Could Chicago have won the East and, possibly, a seventh title?

Depends who’s asked.

“I think we would have been right there,” said former Bull Jud Buechler, now with the Detroit Pistons. “It seems like there’s not really one team that’s really dominating. If we would have brought everyone back, who knows? If there weren’t any injuries to our team, I think we could have been in the mix for sure.”

In the mix, maybe. But win it all? No way, general manager Jerry Krause said. Not without Jordan.

“Michael was such a big part in the locker room. He made everyone around him better, and filling that hole would have been near impossible,” Krause said. “We thought we could win a bunch of games, but winning a championship, we did not think we had the ability to do that.”

Even before Jordan retired, the Bulls were showing signs the reign was coming to an end. They barely got by Indiana in last year’s Eastern Conference finals. Not even “Judge Judy” could have reconciled coach Phil Jackson and Krause. Dennis Rodman was getting weirder--and that’s tough to do.

The Bulls were getting older, too, with Longley the only starter under 30.

So when Jordan hung up his sneakers in January, the Bulls decided it was best to gut the team and start over. The first to go was Pippen, who--feeling underappreciated and underpaid--was looking to leave.

“I was looking to come out west, so I don’t know what would have happened,” said Pippen, who signed a five-year, $67.2 million deal with the Rockets. “I was looking to move on, and that’s what I did. Whether or not we could have stayed together as a team and been successful is difficult to say.”

It’s not like anyone else is lighting up the league, though. Indiana, anointed the favorite before the lockout even ended, has struggled. Miami lost to the Bulls over the weekend.

On the other coast, the Utah Jazz are vulnerable, the Rockets have yet to live up to their hype and the Los Angeles Lakers need therapy more than a title.

“Our guys had been there,” said Frank Hamblen, a Bulls assistant under Jackson and now Tim Floyd. “Plus, Michael, as great as he is, we still had a lot of good players left who knew the system, played together and been champions together.

“I think it would have been hard, but I still think we would have been right there as far as in the East.”

Instead, the Bulls finished the year in last place in the Central Division with a 13-37 record, the third-worst record in the NBA. They also finished with the worst winning percentage in franchise history. They’ve set or tied all kinds of lowlights, including the NBA’s record for fewest points in a game.

But as bad as this season is, Krause said re-signing everyone would have doomed Chicago for years. Pippen, Longley and Kerr signed five-year deals worth a total of $118 million, meaning the Bulls would have had little, if any, salary-cap room the next few years. Now Chicago has oodles of cap room and a bunch of extra draft picks.

“We would have been capped with the oldest team in the league and no way to get younger,” Krause said. “And one of the worst things I think you can do is come fairly close and be old and capped.”

And in the end, do the what-ifs really matter? What’s done is done, said Ron Harper, the only starter left in Chicago.

“I don’t look around and sit back and say, ‘I’d hoped we had our same team here,”’ he said. “If we would have kept half our team here, I think we would have been there. But it didn’t happen, so life goes on.”