lessthanjake wrote:ScrantonBulls wrote:Hair Jordan wrote:
The Bulls won 67 games in 1991-92. Jordan and Pippen played heavy minutes during their repeat season and then went directly to the ‘92 Olympics. The following year (1992-93) they eased back on the throttle to give Jordan and Pippen more rest. The end result was a 57 win season - 10 fewer wins than the previous year. They underachieved a little. The 1993-94 Bulls overachieved in Jordan’s absence by winning 55 games to everyone’s surprise and that’s why Ho Grant and BJ Armstrong were rewarded with All Star selections - not because they were legit All Stars. Neither one of them ever made another All Star appearance. The Bulls WERE NOT stacked. They had a bunch of new faces - Kukoc, Kerr, Harper, Meyers etc. The following year, those same Bulls fell back down to Earth and were 34-31 before Jordan came out of retirement and went 13-4 the rest of the regular season. They were basically a .500 team without Jordan.
This sharade of acting like the 93-94 Bulls were the same as the 94-95 Bulls is pretty funny.
The 1st 3-peat was so stacked that you remove a godlike player (MJ) and they still won 55 games. So stacked that teammates like Horace and BJ finally got their flowers and were picked to be all stars.
Horace was so impactful on winning that the year he leaves, he helps his new team to the finals. Dude was a beast and one hell of a defender.
The quality of the supporting cast matters a lot. I notice that LeBron/anti-Jordan fans are readily able to acknowledge this when assessing why the Lakers have been unsuccessful in recent years, but seem to turn off that part of their brain when assessing things like the 1994 Bulls.
It's amazing how fast they are to realize that context actually matters when you point out that the Bulls were a 34-31 team in 1995 without MJ. Or that the Lakers were only a .500 team in the games Lebron played in 2019. Or that AD was the one who took them from a lottery team to a champion in 2020.