Two nights later we scored 128 points in a blowout win over the Clippers. By then we had Reggie back. He helps spread the court open, and then Antonio and Dale can do a little more down low. When you don’t have Reggie out there and you’ve just got Chris Mullin working the perimeter, and the Spurs put just one guy on him, then they bring Tim Duncan over to guard Mark Jackson, that makes it really difficult. A loss like the San Antonio game would be devastating if it was football and you had a week to think about it. Thankfully, we didn’t. For us it was a bad loss, so let’s move on.
In preseason I told our team we should win at least 55 games. By the All-Star break we were right where I had hoped we’d be. We were 33–13, and we had the best record in the East. For most of the first half of the season, we were battling with Chicago, New York, and Miami for that right. I was happy with our position, but the last thing I was going to do was allow our guys to get comfortable with our new status. There was one thing I hadn’t thought about when I was mapping out our goals, and that was that the coach of the team with the best record in the East has to coach the All-Star game.
I really wasn’t interested in coaching the All-Star game. I had already booked a flight to go down to our place in Florida. I thought it was funny, in a way, that I got picked for the game, since I had never liked All-Star games as a player either. I kept telling everyone I wasn’t going. I said, “I think Dick and Rick should go in my place.” I didn’t want to go. I needed a break. Plus, the game was in New York, and I’ve never liked going there. But I knew it would be really bad for the franchise if I didn’t do it. For one thing, Rik Smits was on the team for the first time, and Reggie was there after being left off the year before. Donnie was really concerned that I wouldn’t show up for it, but in the end I knew I had to. A couple of days after it became official I’d be the East coach, we were getting ready to go out to practice at Market Square. The players were stretching, then Dick and Rick walked out there, and just as I’m coming up the ramp, all of a sudden I hear this loud music blaring. It’s that song “I Love New York.” The players were howling. They loved it. It was Reggie’s idea.
Anyhow, if I was going to go to this All-Star game, I wanted to make sure we won it. I could tell from the first practice we had that all the East players felt the same way. So I got them all together and told them, “We’ve got an All-Star team. No matter who we put in should be able to compete with the other team.” Dick, Rick, and I made up a time chart and put it in the locker room. That way everybody knew how much they were going to play beforehand. And we kept to it too. That was tough. I felt bad for certain guys, like Glen Rice, who then played for Charlotte. He came out, and he was having one of those games when you just knew if you kept him in there for 35 minutes he would score 35 points, pretty easy. When that kid gets on one of his streaks, he’s unconscious. But when his time was up I had to take him out of the game. He didn’t say anything about it, but I felt bad anyway.
Michael, of course, was on the team, but he was sick and he missed our one day of practice. He made it for the game, though. I was the first one on the bus for our shootaround, and he got on, and I said, “How many minutes do you want to play?” He told me, “Enough to win.” I said, “Okay. You let me know, because I know you’re sick.” He ended up playing around 32 minutes, which was more than anybody. I mixed all the other guys in around him. People asked me if it was weird coaching Jordan. I told them, “I didn’t coach him. I just watched him play.” We did put in a couple of plays in practice and told Michael, “All we’re doing is running a basic motion offense. If you want to pick and roll, just holler.”
I know one of the reasons Michael played so well was because there was all that talk of the young kid from the Lakers, Kobe Bryant, being the next Michael Jordan. Michael doesn’t like to hear that kind of crap. I know Michael well enough to be able to tell you that. So the kid goes out there and tries to do it all himself, and you knew that wasn’t going to work. If Bryant came out and had a hell of a game, and won the MVP, that would be different. But you can’t just hand him the ball and tell him to take over without him earning it first. Guys have too much pride in this league, especially the superstars. That’s why Karl Malone was upset. He wanted to play basketball. He’s trying to set the kid a pick, and Bryant’s waving off Karl Malone. That’s no good. But that’s what happens in those games. Guys get carried away. They think it’s their chance at the spotlight. But the funny thing about All-Star games is they’ve always been the same, from high school right on up. Guards control the game. They decide whether they’re going to bother to pass it, or who they’re going to pass it to, and whether they’re going to dribble the ball. If you’re a big guy, there’s nothing you can do but watch and be ready in case someone throws you a pass now and then.
I enjoyed being around the guys at the All-Star game. A lot of those young players are very talented, and I haven’t been around them very much, and it’s like anything—they’re nice kids when you spend a little time with them. When I played in those games, the winners got $2,000 and the losers got $1,000. Last year, I think it was $10,000 and $5,000. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen when players really want the extra money. Fans have this idea the All-Star game is just for fun, and nobody cares what happens, but believe me, that’s not true. These guys care—a lot. That’s why there’re always arguments about who was the MVP of the game and all that. The year I coached the team, it was obvious. Michael was the MVP, and nobody disputed it.
When Reggie, Rik, and I got back to Indiana, the city was really buzzing. It was nice to see people excited about the Pacers again. There have been times when the franchise has really struggled to get support. Indiana is the best basketball state in the country, but the emphasis has been on high school and college ball for so long that the pros have always seemed to come up a little short. When I used to play for the Celtics, we’d go into Market Square Arena, and there would be so many Boston fans that it felt like a home game. The big difference was I loved playing in Boston Garden, and I always had a brutal time at Market Square. I hated that arena. The sight lines were bad, and the rims were always too tight and too high. When I became coach of the Pacers, I had the guys who run the arena measure those rims. I stood right there with them while they did it. They use a pole to measure them. I said to the guy, “I’m telling you, that rim is too high.” He said, “No, look. It says ten feet.” So I said to the guy, “I know it does, but have you ever measured the pole?”
Before we started the second half of the season I gave my guys a little speech about how important it was to be consistent over the final two months of the season, to get your team ready for the playoffs. If you look at what Utah and Chicago have traditionally done during those months, I think you’ll find it’s pretty impressive. Our guys, for whatever reason, got into a little bit of a funk after the All-Star break. We come back after the break, and we beat Orlando and Miami, two Eastern Conference rivals, and then we play Dallas at home, where they’re having all sorts of problems, and we lose that game. That’s how it went for a month or so. Win. Loss. Win. Loss. It drove me crazy. I told our guys, “If you want to make a statement in these playoffs, this is the time you have to be getting your game together. This is no time to go into cruise control.” But my guys are veterans, and they know. Mark and Reggie helped out there. They got the guys in the right frame of mind. We won eight of our final ten games in April, and finished the regular season with 58 wins. It was the most wins the franchise had since they came over to the NBA. But as good as we were, we didn’t break the all-time Pacers record. In 1970, when Indiana won the ABA championship, they had 59 wins under Coach Slick Leonard.
Fifty-eight wins was nice, but what really made me feel hopeful was that these guys had proven they could play with the best in the league. They had proven they could beat Chicago, in Chicago. They had beaten Utah at home, and nearly beat them on the road. They had beaten Phoenix, in Phoenix. They took three out of four from Miami.
There was only one test left, and that was to see if they could win it all. When you really got down to it, our team all agreed on one thing: the one guy standing in our way was Michael Jordan.
On Jordan, Magic, and Myself
O
ne of the most frustrating games of my short coaching career was when we played Chicago at the United Center in February of my first season. Every guy on my team was turning down shots. They were completely out of sync. It was a difficult game for me to watch, because my guys kept hesitating. I didn’t know why they did that. I had never seen them do that before. Then I realized—it was Michael Jordan. My team was convinced they couldn’t beat the Bulls as long as Jordan was there. I spent the rest of the season convincing them it wasn’t true.
After we got beat in that February game, and looked so intimidated in the process, I called my team together and said, “Have you ever seen anyone knock Michael Jordan on his butt? Have you ever seen anyone challenge him, eyeball to eyeball? People might talk a little trash to him, but the truth is, everybody is scared of him. Including you guys.” They knew I was right. The guy had become untouchable. If you took Michael Jordan somewhere else in the world, and took the name off the back of his jersey, and put him out there where nobody knew who he was, guys would be beating on him and banging him. But here, it’s, “Hey, isn’t he amazing?” Even the refs are afraid of him.
I told my guys, “The next time we play Chicago, I want you to knock Michael Jordan flat on his butt if you get the chance. That’s part of the game, understand?” But they wouldn’t do it. He had them too psyched out. Michael Jordan played the mind game better than almost anyone. He really knew how to get inside people’s heads. Plus, I believe he had the second best player in the league playing right next to him in Scottie Pippen. You take Michael off that team, and Scottie moves down to fifth. But when Michael was out there with him, they were the two best in the league.
Michael did some of the things I used to do, like walk up to a guy on the other team and tell him, in a low voice, exactly how he was going to beat him. So now the defense knows what he’s going to run, but Michael gets the ball, does exactly what he told the guy, and beats him anyway. Believe me, having done it to people myself, it’s absolutely devastating.
Everyone was so worried about what would happen to the league when Magic and I retired, but I told them they shouldn’t give it any more thought. Michael Jordan was going to be The Man. No question about it. I said, “Guys, here is your next superstar. He’ll make you forget all about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.” I believed that, because I knew Michael was that good, and he had the right kind of personality to go along with it. In 1987, Jordan’s third season in the league, Chicago played our Celtics team in the playoffs, and Jordan scored 63 points against us. Afterward, everyone was just in awe. I told people, “That was God, disguised as Michael Jordan.”
It was a truly unbelievable performance. It was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever been around. We could not stop him. But to be honest, we didn’t spend much time talking about him in the huddle. All we were concerned with was winning the game. At the time, we were up 2–0 against Chicago in a first-round, best-of-five series, and we wanted to sweep them. Game 3 was in Chicago Stadium, and we wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible. People forget that Michael had 48 or 49 points in Game 1. That was a close one, wire to wire. We beat them 108–104, but we weren’t feeling great about it. There was a sense of, “We better get this series over with, because this guy is dangerous.” We were right about that. In that 63-point game, he just kept hitting everything. Everything. But in the end we got the win. I walked out of there thinking what I always did when I saw a great individual performance like that: one guy can’t beat a whole team.
From the first time I saw Michael, I knew he was very talented, but I never would have guessed he would turn into probably the best player in history. My first impression of him? Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. I didn’t see him play much in college, but I remember back in 1984 when Michael was playing on the United States Olympic team, they had a bunch of us pros come up to Indianapolis and play against them. We showed up there all out of shape, fooling around, and we played some games against them in the Hoosier Dome. You could tell Jordan could jump, he could pass, you could see he could do a little bit of everything, but he wasn’t the kind of guy that you’d just sit down and watch the whole time. There were some other pretty good players on that team, like Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin. It wasn’t like you watched only Jordan and walked away from there thinking, “I just saw the future of the league.”
When he got into the NBA and I played against him a few times, I remember thinking to myself, “Whoa, this kid has got a lot of talent. I can’t believe how high he can jump, and how out of control he is. He’s going to score a lot of points forever.” But I saw a change in Michael after a while. He wasn’t on fast-forward all the time. He was more patient on the floor. Then I started thinking, “Boy if they put some players around this guy, I wonder if he’ll calm down a little bit and use his passing skills.” Because I always felt he didn’t understand the game. Well, now I realize he always understood the game, he just didn’t have the players. Simple as that. It’s amazing to me that he could score as many points as he did and still play within the team frame.
The one reason I do feel badly for Michael is that he didn’t have one team, or one player, to shoot for year after year, like Magic and I did. If I didn’t play at the same time as Magic Johnson, I might have won a couple more championships, but I don’t know if they would have been nearly as worthwhile. I loved the fact that we both spent our careers fighting each other every day for those rings. I wouldn’t have traded that rivalry for anything.