The Chicago Bulls were the most dominant team in the NBA from 1996 to 1998, winning their second three-peat and their 4th, 5th, and 6th championships of the decade. Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman were the three stars of that Bulls team, and many consider them to be the greatest NBA team ever.
Famously though, the team was broken up after GM Jerry Krause refused to bring Phil Jackson back after 1998. But Dennis Rodman recently pointed to MJ getting fed up as the reason they didn’t win four in a row instead of three.
“Well, I look at it like this. If egos weren’t… That Last Dance, Phil just came up with that. Where he said this is the last season is the Last Dance. He wrote a book about it and he wrote a playbook about it called the Last Dance. He wasn’t coming back,” Rodman said on Vlad TV.
“This is it? Because the next year, it was a half-season. I was like, we could have won this thing for four in a row. But I tried saying in the pep rally, ‘Hey let’s bring this, let’s bring everybody back together, stuff like that. But it’s like, wow damn. Some days you look back and say we could have won in a row. Easy. I think Michael got fed up… Michael left, they didn’t bring me back, Phil left, and that was it.”
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It’s interesting to think about what might have been, the Bulls were one of the best-assembled teams of all time. And they were certainly still at the top of their game, many fans think they could have won it all again. Michael Jordan had already retired once after a three-peat, and he did so again after the second one. It seems like drama and off-court issues got in the way of the Bulls winning a 7th straight championship.
Could The Chicago Bulls Have Won Four In A Row?
While it’s true that the Chicago Bulls stars were getting older, the 1998-99 NBA season would have provided the perfect opportunity for another ring. The lockout-shortened season meant teams just played 50 regular season games before the playoffs. While the San Antonio Spurs had emerged as a serious threat, they met the 8th-seed New York Knicks in the Finals. Chicago might have breezed through the East that year.
Michael Jordan himself has complained in the past about not being allowed to run it back again until they last. So it might be a bit unfair of Rodman to say they didn’t because he was fed up. If Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson hadn’t had such big issues with one another, we might be talking about the seven championships that Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won during the 1990s.
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