Boxed In: Could the Chicago Bulls have won a 7th NBA title?

The greatest basketball player of all time coming off a three-peat up against a shortened NBA season, a severed finger tendon, and the greatest power forward of all time. On today's episode of Boxed In, we're having a bit of an after party for The Last Dance and asking the question, if the Chicago Bulls ran it back after 1998, could they pulled off a four-peat and have won a 7th NBA championship? Dunk Bait's LaJethro Jenkins presides over arguments from Yahoo's NBA reporters Seerat Sohi and Vincent Goodwill on whether a lockout year, organization-wide infighting, salary cap concerns, and an aging roster meant 1998 was truly The Last Dance for the Bulls. Watch or listen to Boxed In every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on Yahoo Sports, YouTube or on your podcast provider of choice. Subscribe: https://apple.co/39UC09o https://spoti.fi/3aVpV56

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Welcome to another edition of "Boxed In" from Yahoo Sports. I am the one, the only Lajethro Jenkins, holding court. We got Yahoo's NBA reporter Seerat Sohi and Vince Goodwill in the grindhouse. Today, we're having a bit of an afterparty for "The Last Dance" and asking the question, could the Bulls have won a seventh NBA championship? Seerat, let's start with you.

SEERAT SOHI: Yeah. The way I see it, you're the winner until you lose, basically. There is no reason for anybody to be coming up and saying this team would have beat them or that team would have beat them when we just don't know. You had one of the best teams of all time. I see no reason to doubt them. Now, I know that they were a little bit older, but at the same time, this team always, always, always found a way when they were all connected.

If you look at the sixth title season, you could have made a lot of the exact same arguments that you would make for them not winning a seventh title, and they won it anyways. They had a championship pedigree, and any team that was gonna beat them-- for example, the Spurs-- oh, Vinny's pulled up his mic. He's really to go.

[LAUGHING]

Any team that was gonna beat them was gonna be not that experienced. The Spurs that ended up winning the title that year-- that was their first title. It was a rookie Tim Duncan. Granted, probably one of the best players that Jordan would have had to face, but at a younger age. And I think that guile that they had would have definitely gotten them over the top.

At the end of the day, the Spurs beat the Knicks. The Knicks without Ewing. They dominated the West, but and they didn't impress in the Finals in they way that would have convinced me, at least, that they would have definitely beat the Bulls. I think you have to go with the team that that's proven it.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: I think LJ and Sprewell were the best players on that Knicks team, or something like that.

VINCE GOODWILL: Allan Houston--

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Allan Houston. OK, yeah.

VINCE GOODWILL: --and Latrell Sprewell were the best teams, which ironically, would have been the best set of wings that Michael Jordan would have faced that late in the playoffs, had that been the case.

I'm not here to argue for the New York Knicks. I'm not even here to argue for the San Antonio Spurs, even though Tim Duncan was in year 2 and not a rookie. I'm here to argue for common sense. Four championships in a row has never been done in modern NBA history. We can talk about the Celtics of the '60s, but we're talking about post-merger. You've won three. Exit the casino before you lose your money.

Now, it's not the take away from the Bulls' greatness that they would not have won the seventh title. It's just an argument for common sense. Michael Jordan was 35 going on 36 with a cigar-cutter accident that happened in the off-season of 1998 that severed a tendon in his right index finger, which means he could not grip a basketball. Not saying that that takes you from a best player in the league standing to a average player, but when you're an older team, you need every advantage that you can get.

You're telling me Scottie Pippen is coming back? You're telling me Dennis Rodman, who left the Finals to go wrastlin', stays on the wagon for another season, a truncated, 50-game season? I need everybody to put away the pixie dust, to put away the fairies, to put away all these things-- "make it, take it," "we never saw Michael Jordan lose," all that type of nonsense-- and let's just add some common sense here. Ladies and gentlemen, I will prove to you beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, Judge Lajethro Jenkins, that there's no way on God's green Earth that the Bulls would have come close to a seventh championship.

And here's the other part of it. It wouldn't have diminished their greatness one bit. Going 6 and 1, compared to 6 and 0, doesn't change the fact that they were the best team of modern NBA history. But their time was over.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Do you think they can get Pippen and Kerr to sign?

VINCE GOODWILL: Absolutely not. Put it like this. As we saw in the documentary, Scottie Pippen is just as ornery as Michael Jordan is petty. He said, I would rather-- knowing everything that came from it, I'd still sit on the bench and let the Toni Kukoc thing happen. I don't have those regrets. He also said, I'm the guy that made sure our '98 championship season was as difficult as possible, because I wanted to have a hot-boy summer.

He went out and had a hot-boy summer in '97. Because he got hurt on company time, he wanted to have surgery on company time, teammates be damned. So you mean to tell me that without a shadow of a reasonable doubt, that Scottie Pippen, who had been waiting for a payday after signing a bad contract, was gonna sign a one-year deal just so he can add to Michael Jordan's lore? Please.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Seerat, what do you think?

SEERAT SOHI: First of all, I'd say, when you say "never been done before" as a reason why the Bulls and Michael Jordan couldn't have done something, I think all that would do is make Jordan and the Bulls lick their chops. The idea of having to face the impossible is really the only thing that would have motivated this team. Winning a fourth title-- that's, like you said, unheard of, other than in the '60s. Other than Russell's Celtics, who played when there were, like, four teams in the NBA-- there were some quotas going on there. Other than that, no one's ever, ever done it before.

To me, I look at that, and that challenge-- that's unifying enough, especially for a player like Michael Jordan, who was so, so aware of his legacy. You talk about a right tendon injury in his finger? That's fine. This is the guy who wanted to play through a broken foot to try to make the playoffs in his second year, and that was before they really had any shot at it, either. He's incredibly determined. If you give him a challenge, he's gonna go up for it.

And I also think, just for the whole argument's sake, we have to assume it's the same team getting back together. If we're thinking about free agency and losing Pippen, then I don't really know what we're arguing about, 'cause we have no idea what that team would look like. But if you bring those exact same guys back, and if you signed Pippen to a reasonable contract, then I don't think you're getting pouty Scottie Pippen and all this drama around the team, because he's gonna be content. He's gonna say, OK, you know what? You guys paid me.

On top of that, you're coming back into a lockout-shortened season, where an older team has a little bit of an advantage, because they don't have to play 82 games. They only would have had to play 50 games. I imagine they wouldn't have really treated the regular season like a big deal, and they would have gotten a bigger break going into that season, that summer. So it really, I think, favors them.

At the same time, they still have Steve Kerr. Steve Kerr went and signed with the Spurs that year. I'm not saying that makes the biggest difference in the world, but it's one more thing that is on their side, versus a team that ended up being in the NBA Finals.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: I remember Steve Kerr hitting some big shots in those Finals, too. I do remember that.

VINCE GOODWILL: What we not gonna do? What we're not going to do here is extol the virtues of Steve Kerr, the seventh man on the team, and say that he's gonna be the difference between winning and losing, between living and dying.

SEERAT SOHI: I didn't say he was the difference.

VINCE GOODWILL: [INAUDIBLE], but we're not gonna do that. No, no. We're not gonna do that. We're not gonna do that at all.

I have on a shirt. Can you guys see it? It says "Ali" on it, right? Ali is Paul Bunyan, but Ali lost fights. Ali lost to Ken Norton. Ali lost to Joe Frazier. Ali was a shell of himself on the back end of his career. Didn't diminish his greatness. He just stayed in the ring a couple of fights too long. Michael Jordan has turned into Paul Bunyan in everybody's eyes.

He's the greatest player of all time, no doubt, but when we say, oh, he could have dunked on a 13-foot rim and shot from 35 feet-- did you guys look at the 1998 Finals from an efficiency standpoint, from a legs standpoint? Michael Jordan was ready for retirement. He was ready to go. So to say that he was gonna have the same motivation, to say-- as his fifth MVP campaign, he wasn't the player that he was the previous three or four years, even from his comeback. The drop-off had started, so he wasn't even the same, efficient player.

And here's the other part of it, guys. Scottie Pippen was done. Whether he was happy, unhappy, or whatever, Scottie Pippen's star days were done by that point. We can't assume, just because he came back, that he was going to make the All-Star team, or an all-defensive team, or be an MVP candidate, because once he left Chicago, that never happened. Once, basically, he passed that '96-'97 season, he was not that same player again. Michael Jordan, at his best, needed Scottie Pippen to be somewhat close to his best for them to be successful. Scottie Pippen was a shell of himself in Houston, a shell of himself in Portland, so we have to look at that situation accurately.

And to the other part, there was a guy in San Antonio named Tim Duncan who would have been the best player Michael Jordan would have faced in the Finals. Tim Duncan is not Karl Malone, and he's not Charles Barkley. We've never seen Tim Duncan make the big-time mistakes on the Finals level that we saw Malone and Barkley do. San Antonio was not gonna beat themselves the way that the Utah Jazz did, had the Bulls even made the Finals.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Even in his second year, you think second-year Tim Duncan is the best player he's ever played?

VINCE GOODWILL: Even in his second year, absolutely.

In a 50-game season, to the larger point of-- those games started around late January, early February, if memory serves. That means that you're having to cram a bunch of games into a very truncated schedule. I don't think that helps, 'cause that Bulls team was tired in '98. They would have been tired going into '99 as well. How many old teams have we seen get younger with an off-season? Old teams get older. Old teams don't get younger. This is a young man's game, and the Bulls were no longer young.

SEERAT SOHI: They would have had three months to rest. It's not like they'd be coming in after-- I know that championships wear you down. Going from June to October-- that's not really a rest. I think we know that after seeing the way that the Warriors and LeBron have had to load-manage in order to keep making these runs. But starting to play again in January is so different from starting to play again in October. That's a full three months where these guys would have been a lot hungrier to play.

Now, if you're gonna tell me that Michael Jordan wouldn't have been motivated to win, I don't really know what to say to that. If there's anything we know about Michael Jordan, whether his skills would have been diminished or not, and he would've been a little less athletic, he would have 100% been motivated, because at the end of the day, there's nothing that man loves to do more than win, and there's nothing he hates more than losing. If you give him three extra months, and you give the Bulls three extra months to stew on this-- and you know they're not gonna go hard for 50 games.

It's not like all these other teams that would have been trying to get the number-one seed and all that stuff. They would've been confident in who they were. They would have rested down the stretch. They wouldn't have tried to cram all these games in. And you also would have had a healthier Scottie Pippen going in there. I know that he wasn't the same player he was, but in Houston, he played 50 games and played for over 40 minutes per game. That's unheard of now, especially for a player his age. There's no way he would have been--

VINCE GOODWILL: And how did he play, Seerat? Look. You can play hard, and you can play long. It don't mean you play well. Scottie Pippen never made an All-Star game after 1997.

SEERAT SOHI: That's 'cause he never should have gone somewhere else. He was at his best when he was with Jordan. If anybody exposed himself after '98 on that team, it was him. I understand he had back injuries, but it was also a matter of fit. He was in a perfect situation in Chicago, and he would have stayed in that situation. He would have been healthier.

He would've been able to give Jordan a little bit more of a break, which is one of the reasons he was so tired in the 1998 run. It was because Pippen was hurt, and Dennis was all over the place. Now, granted, Dennis might be all over the place again. That would probably hold. But you're also gonna have a much more balanced roster, in terms of rest, going into those Finals.

And going into the playoffs-- let's just look at the playoffs that year. They're not losing to the Knicks, and those Knicks beat the Pacers. Now, I know those Pacers took 'em to seven, but being taken to seven doesn't really mean anything. It doesn't translate to the next year. We see, over and over again in the NBA, where we assume that a team that got taken to seven is weak. The Warriors got taken to seven by the Rockets and then pummeled them the next year.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Let's move to closing arguments. Let's start with you, Vince. We started with Seerat first, so start with you, Vince.

VINCE GOODWILL: Judge Jenkins, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if we were to argue that the Bulls could have won the 1994 championship as a four-peat with Michael Jordan as a leader, I would much rather make that argument for you. A younger Jordan, a prime Pippen, a Horace Grant, still a younger, hungry team. I would take that four-peat over a 1999, almost March-Madness-style NBA season where the Atlanta Hawks-- the Atlanta Hawks made it to the actual second round in the NBA playoffs in 1999.

And the New York Knicks, while they were an eight seed, were not an eighth seed in a traditional sense. So if Michael Jordan's gonna miss time during the regular season, where 50 games are of the essence, we're not sure that he's gonna come back, turning 36 years old during that season, to be the Michael Jordan the Chicago Bulls needed him to be for the long run. And once again, Scottie Pippen was done, and Dennis Rodman only played 30 games past 1998 for two teams. There's far too many variables here, ladies and gentlemen, for us to assume that the Bulls would have won a seventh championship.

Too many things had to go right, and just saying, well, it's Michael Jordan-- that can't be our only reason here. We need empirical evidence, and as the wonderful orator that Seerat Sohi is, she did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Bulls would have done anything other than suffer the same fate as the Larry Bird Celtics, or the Magic Johnson Lakers, or the Isaiah Thomas Pistons. When your time is up, your time is up. What happened to the Bulls was that they literally left the casino before people realized that they had robbed it.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Your floor, Seerat.

SEERAT SOHI: That's some nice "Law and Order" vibes there from Vince.

[LAUGHTER]

I appreciate that dedication to your art.

First of all, I would say, it's Michael Jordan. It's pretty, pretty strong empirical evidence in and of itself. We all watched "The Last Dance." I understand that the man gets mythologized a little too much these days, but at the same time, there's a reason that that exists. The guy finds a way. The Bulls find a way. You're giving these Bulls, one year older--

VINCE GOODWILL: 1995. Wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Go ahead, Seerat. You had the floor, Vince. You had your chance.

SEERAT SOHI: Yeah. Come on, Vince.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Come on, bro.

SEERAT SOHI: Come on. Objection.

You got six months of rest for these guys. From June to January, they don't have to do anything. They never had a break like that in any of their championship runs. I know that those 50 games would have been crunched up, but it's not like they would have gone full-throttle and even played in all 50 of those games, at least not the main guys.

You got Michael Jordan coming back well-rested. Dennis Rodman-- yeah, he didn't have a lot of success later in his career, but he was in a perfect situation for him with the perfect coach and guys that understood that he needed to have a little bit of space. That's not a very common thing in the NBA, but in the situation that he was in, I think he still would have thrived despite what happened later on in his career.

And I think the same is true for Pippen because of the position that he was in. For him to try and go and reinvent himself after all the injuries, and at the age that he was-- yeah, that was tough. But him coming back after six months off, on the same team, doing the same thing he's done for his entire career-- they would have been fine. They would have been fine. They would have brought back everybody else, and they have this incredible motivation to be the only team in history other than Russell's Celtics that have won four titles in a row. Of course, they're already mythologized, but that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, would have made them the best dynasty of all time.

On top of that, if you bring everybody back, you don't have the same tension that you had in the '98 Finals or the entire '98 season, really, where everybody's wondering what's gonna happen. I'm sure, if that's the actual last dance, they're probably fine with it. And the other thing is, they're all paid after that, too, so they're not worried about these little things. Pippen isn't a huge problem, and everyone's satisfied-- everyone, I guess, except for probably Jerry Krause. That, I think, would have been a much smoother season, and I think they would have appreciated it after being away from the game for longer.

At the end of the day, the championship pedigree wins over, at least until it stops winning. I think you always have to give credit to the team that got it done.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: I've come to my conclusion. I've come to my conclusion. Seerat, I do agree with you. I think that if the Bulls were the same Bulls, they would have won. However, the point that Vince made about him being as ornery as Michael was petty-- I do not see Pippin coming back. Also, going off empirical evidence, Pippen was not the same player, and Michael needed Pippen, obviously. He scored what? 45, 1, and 1, I think, in game 6, in order for them to beat the Jazz. Do you need that type of Herculean effort from Michael throughout a full season-- well, a partial season, 50 games? I just don't see it happening. I have to rule for Vince. You made a great argument, but I have to rule for Vince, just based off empirical evidence--

[LAUGHING]

--and the reality of the situation. You know what I'm saying? Any final comments?

SEERAT SOHI: I think you have to assume that Pippen is back, just for the sake of the argument. He probably isn't, but for the sake of the argument. But--

[MUSIC PLAYING]

--accept defeat.

LAJETHRO JENKINS: Well, thank you for listening to "Boxed In." This is another episode. We are here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Congratulations, Vince, on the win. I hope to catch you guys later.