1993 Overview
From Hoopedia
1992-93 NBA Season
Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen played for the the Dream Team in the 1992 Olympic Games at Barcelona, and despite the United States’ easy road to the gold medal that August, they came home thoroughly exhausted.
With his stars having run through two championship seasons and the Olympics, Phil Jackson backed off from the Bulls’ trademark pressure defense. But Jordan called an oncourt conference and told his teammates to resume the pressure. “Maybe we gamble and we lose our legs,” Jordan later explained. “I still don’t think we get conservative now. When we try to slow down, things get too deliberate.”
The season, Jordan said, was “monotony.” For the Bulls, that meant another division championship, 57 wins (their fourth straight 50-win season) and a seventh straight scoring crown for Jordan, tying him with Wilt Chamberlain.
On January 8, Jordan surpassed 20,000 career points after just 620 games. Only Chamberlain got to that milestone faster, taking 499 games. “It looks like I fell short of Wilt again, which is a privilege,” Jordan said.
Behind him in the scoring race was Atlanta’s Dominique Wilkins at 29.9 points per game, while Utah’s John Stockton again led the league in assists (12.0) and Detroit’s Dennis Rodman secured yet another rebounding title (18.3).
For two years, the Knicks and Patrick Ewing had their championship hopes end in playoff battles with the Bulls. So Coach Pat Riley used the full force of his considerable intensity to drive New York to 60 wins and the home-court advantage in the East.
Once in the playoffs, the Bulls and Knicks easily advanced to the Conference Finals, where they split the first four games. “My favorite Michael move came from that series, where he went baseline, and [Charles] Oakley cut the baseline off,” Pippen recalled. “Michael kind of turned his back to him, then he did a spin back and was able to get by him and dunk on Patrick. That was probably the most dominating move I’ve ever seen. to be able just to break that whole defense down like that.”
Jordan scored 54 points to drive Chicago to a 105-95 win in Game 4, and it was Jordan’s triple-double (29 points, 10 rebounds, and 14 assists) that dominated the statistics column in Game 5, when Chicago took the series lead 3-2. But it was Pippen's successive blocks of putback attempts by New York’s Charles Smith in the final minute that closed off the Knicks’ hopes. Then, when the Bulls closed out the series in Chicago, it was Pippen again doing the final damage, a corner jumper and a trey, in a 96-88 victory.
The Bulls had persevered to return to their third straight NBA Finals, this time to meet the Phoenix Suns, who had traded for Charles Barkley and won a league-best 62 games, many of them in their brand new America West Arena. Under veteran Coach Cotton Fitzsimmons, Phoenix had survived a First-Round scare against the Lakers, then defeated San Antonio and followed that by taking Seattle in seven games in the Western Conference Finals. The Bulls claimed the first two games in Phoenix, but the Suns outlasted Jordan and company in triple overtime in Game 3 in Chicago Stadium. Chicago won Game 4 (the only time a home team won a game in the series), then lost Game 5, which left Jordan furious that his team had to board a plane for Game 6 in Phoenix. There a tight game came down to John Paxson’s three-pointer with 3.9 seconds on the clock as the Bulls pulled out a 99-98 victory.
“I knew it was in as soon as Pax shot it,” Jordan said.
“It was like a dream come true,” Paxson said. “You're a kid out in your driveway shooting shots to win championships. When you get down to it, it’s still just a shot in a basketball game. But I think it allowed a lot of people to relate to that experience because there are a lot of kids and adults who lived out their own fantasies in their back yards.”
