hawkfan68":2u8iifsh said:
How many championships did Scottie Pippen win without Michael Jordan? He played without him on the Bulls for a couple of years in the mid-90s and then after he left the Bulls, he played for the Rockets and Trailblazers. He didn’t lead any team to a championship during his career. He was a very good player but not the best player in the league or even on his own teams.
In '94, the Bulls were so close to beating the Knicks that basically one terrible call at the end of a game made the difference. The Bulls did much better than I expected that season. I can't honestly say they would have won the title if they'd made the NBA Finals, because that Rockets team was pretty good, but I do think they'd have beaten the Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals, and I think they'd have at least given the Rockets as good a fight as the Knicks did, and considering how things happened leading up to that season (I'll say more about that below), the fight the Bulls gave the Knicks was pretty damn impressive.
The argument about winning championships without Jordan is wrong in multiple ways. How many championships did Jordan win without Pippen after Jordan came back with the team in DC? Answer: it doesn't matter, because neither player was the GM for the team on which he played. Additionally, when the Bulls lost Jordan in '93, it was right before teams were going to get together to start training for the '93-'94 season. I was at an ALCS game at Comiskey II, which was later renamed a few times for corporate sponsors, when the rumors started to circulate. By then, the free-agent market had been picked clean. The coaching staff had prepared the playbook thinking the team was going to have Jordan, and suddenly it didn't, so they basically had to rebuild the playbook on the fly, and with a Jordan-sized hole in the roster. The fact that the Bulls did as well as they did that season is a solid point in favor of Pippen, the other players on that roster, and Phil Jackson.
People don't understand how great Pippen really was. He was possibly the greatest perimeter defender the NBA has ever had. He was also an innovator of the "point forward" position. He made major contributions in all phases of the game. He's underappreciated largely because he had a teammate who was much more famous. I'm a Bulls fan (as painful as that's been since after the '98 NBA FInals) and I'll tell you that despite how great Jordan was and how great Phil Jackson was, at least some of those titles almost certainly wouldn't have happened without Pippen's enormous contribution.