A sports blog, The Painted Area, addressed the subject of Phil Jackson’s ability to mend the Lakers recently by digging into my 1998 book Blood On The Horns, about the breakup of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls.
There certainly are some interesting parallels.
Picked up by other bloggers, The Painted Area referred to an incident 10 years ago, when the Bulls were trying to win Jordan’s sixth championship and do-everything forward Scottie Pippen was on the injured list and battling to get General Manager Jerry Krause and the team to trade him.
An interesting point is that Phil leaked this story to me (thank you Zen Guy) during the season, and it became one of several stories that broke when the Chicago Sun-Times excerpted the book in a series of front page stories that August of 1998.
Pippen and Krause had been at odds for years, mainly because Pippen, frightened that he might have a bad back, had signed a long-term contract with the Bulls early in his career that years later left him the 122nd highest salary in the league, although he had long since matured into a Hall of Fame player.
Pippen was infuriated by what he saw as Krause’s disrespect of him by bringing his name up in trade talks over the years.
Sidelined by foot surgery for the first 35 games of that 1997-98 season, Pippen stewed until things boiled over during a West Coast road trip when he told Daily Herald beat writer Kent McDill: “I ain’t coming back [after injury rehab]. I want to be traded. I want to go to Phoenix or L.A.”
The part of the story that Phil leaked to me was that an intoxicated Pippen had blown up at Krause on a team bus during that trip. Pippen issued a drawn-out tirade that stunned the team and left some members sitting there questioning why Jackson didn’t intercede and stop the verbal abuse. It was ugly.
“Why don’t you trade me?” Pippen screamed.
In recalling the incident, one blogger quoted extensively last week from Blood on the Horns:
“For Scottie’s situation,” Jackson said later, “everything kind of broke. The venom kind of broke, and he said, ‘I can’t play for this team anymore.’ He had crossed a bridge with the organization. It was very disappointing. And it took him a while. We had to come back here and really work with Scottie.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to leave the team,” Jackson said.
“Scottie thought he had shown himself the door, because he had had too much to drink,” the coach explained. “It was over the edge.”
The team returned to Chicago just before Thanksgiving, and Jackson arranged for the team therapist to spend some time with Pippen counseling him on his anger. Over the break, Pippen phoned Jackson late one night for a long discussion during which the coach realized that Pippen seemed fairly set in his position not to play for the Bulls again. The coach knew that the team couldn’t be successful without Pippen, that changing his mind would take the best efforts of a variety of people, including Jordan, [Ron] Harper, Jackson himself and several teammates.
“Unfortunately, it took him a while,” Jackson said. “He wasn’t ready to play for another two months. And so it was a situation where he had time to cool out, to look at it and say, ‘Well, my options aren’t very good. I really don’t have another place to go, and this is the right thing to do.’”
“We let Scottie be Scottie,” Harper later said, “and let him grow into what he will put himself into. We are all by his side.”
Part of the strategy, though, included Jackson and Jordan openly expressing displeasure with Pippen’s position. That Monday, Dec. 1st, the coach and star player both suggested that they felt betrayed by Pippen’s demands. “It’s all right to hold it against Scottie,” Jackson told reporters. “We care about Scottie, but we’re going to hold this against Scottie because he’s walking out on us, there’s no doubt about that. Some things are personal and some things are public. Publicly, we like Scottie, but personally there’s always going to be a… residual effect of having gone to bat for Scottie.”
Jordan had already told reporters the previous Saturday that he was “disappointed, very disappointed, that (Pippen) hasn’t been able to put aside his dealings with management.”
Jackson and Jordan said they wouldn’t have returned to the team if they’d known Pippen was going to leave. “There is that kind of feeling: ‘Hey, we came back to do this job together and Scottie ducked out the door,’” Jackson said.
…
Resolving the issue could take six weeks or more, the coach pointed out, and the team could become greatly affected by the distracted.
Of course, Pippen did eventually come back into the fold, and was a huge factor in the championship run. His defense was so good in the Finals that many people thought he would be named MVP (until MJ’s Game 6 heroics trumped everything), and he fought through a debilitating back injury to hobble through Game 6, in a gutty performance that should have permamently erased migraine-induced doubts about his toughness.
The Blood On The Horns incident is worth talking about because Jackson critics often wondered what role Phil played in driving Pippen’s anger.
Did Jackson employ his trademark MindGames to weild Pippen as a weapon against Krause, Jackson’s foe?
My take is that Pippen already had substantial anger built up with Krause. But Jackson critics argued that the coach used that anger to get at the Bulls front office, that he “seeded” it, to use a Jackson term. Then, those critics say, Jackson backed off when Pippen boiled out of control.
That incident from the past begs this question: Did Phil again use player discontent to achieve his goals in dealing with Lakers management?
I think it’s an interesting question.
There’s no doubt that during the turbulent offseason Phil discussed with Kobe the idea of sitting out the season to express his discontent with the Lakers front office. Chicago Tribune writer Sam Smith visited with Jackson in Los Angeles before the season and came away with the idea to write a column saying that Kobe should sit out the season.
How much did Phil shape and use Bryant’s emotions in regard to the Lakers front office?
How much did Phil shape and use the conflict between Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant?
I think these are interesting questions. And the answers are so complex that they almost avoid literal translation. Phil Jackson has an incredibly complex psychological approach to coaching. His players have described it time and again, and I quoted them repeatedly about this issue in MindGames, the Jackson biography I published in 2001.
There are many wonderful components to this deeply psychological approach to coaching. That’s the main reason (with his winning record) that Jackson is a Hall of Fame coach.
Still, there’s also no doubt that there are negatives to Jackson’s manipulative approach. Sometimes those negatives are huge. Sometimes Jackson’s psychological dabbling blows up in his face, as it did with Shaq and Kobe in 2004 and got him fired (the team rehired him a season later). The important thing to remember, however, is that Jackson managed to coach the team to three straight championships while manipulating the division between Bryant and O’Neal.
This recent situation with Bryant has been unbelievably messy. But it has worked. Jackson has gained power over the entire Lakers organization. Owner’s son Jim Buss, the “loose cannon” head of the team’s basketball operations, is now dutifully submissive, to the point that Jackson now feels safe complimenting him and soothing his bruised ego with press quotes stating that Jim Buss is an important part of the decision-making process.
The Painted Area blog, which quoted my Blood On The Horns reporting, raised another important interesting question. In 1998, Jackson managed to heal an uproarious team and bring it together to win a sixth title. Can he do that again with the Lakers?
Wow, that’s asking a lot. For now, Jackson will have to be content with consolidating his power. For the first time in his career, Jackson truly has an organization Under His Thumb (kick in the Rolling Stones sound track here).
A bigger question is, how will Jackson use all this power? He himself pointed out the other day that free agent Grant Hill never even bothered to return his phone call over the summer. Now, from all of my dealings with Grant Hill, he’s a very polite guy. That, in itself, is a huge indication of Jackson’s reputation around the league for manipulation. It’s funny how Kobe Bryant’s critics say he is the reason that free agents don’t want to play for pro basketball’s hallowed franchise. But not to return Jackson’s call? That’s yet more anecdotal evidence from over the years that confirms that players and coaches alike around the league are wary of the Zen Master.
If this blog post could fade with yet another soundtrack, it would be “Smooth Operator.”
He may have a couple of bum hips, but make no mistake: Phil Jackson is a player.
Roland Lazenby is the author of The Show, an oral history of the Lakers; Blood On The Horns, a book about the break up of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls; and MindGames, a biography of Phil Jackson recently rereleased by the University of Nebraska Press.
