While forthright, it is not up to Scottie Pippen to identify the Bulls as the best basketball team ever. To borrow an old dictum from my racket, you are not a writer until someone else says you are a writer. The Bulls are not the greatest team until someone else says they are the greatest team.
Maybe not until everyone says they are, and that is not likely to happen. The fashionable conviction is that the Bulls are the best of a thin lot, which makes one wonder how ordinary must be two-time defending champion Houston, which won in a league without Michael Jordan.
Surpassing a 24-year-old record ought to be cause for applause, not suspicion, which, in this case, looks an awful lot like envy.
Team expansion, talent dilution, widespread indifference, common greed, rampant selfishness, all are reasons to diminish the Bulls’ achievement of winning 70 games, never mind that if all of that is true, the Bulls should not be the only ones doing it, the only ones even close to doing it.
The Bulls have not only had to play their contemporaries but their antecedents, a harder lot to beat, not counting Magic Johnson, of course, who has a leg in then and now.
Other than inaugurations and peace treaties, sports may be the only place were history comes by appointment, and the line forms in Milwaukee Tuesday night. If not there, somewhere else before next weekend. The Bulls have not come this far to make 69 victories look like failure.
It is a hazardous thing the Bulls have done. They have set themselves up as much for catastrophe as for renown. Unlike other playoff teams that will get to forget their seasons, the Bulls will have to justify theirs.
When the Bulls win their 70th or however far it goes, they will be like Greg Norman, on the precipice of disaster, not that the Bulls have a similar history of swallowing their own tongues.
Any fall will be much further than what is left to climb. It will not be 70 wins that will make the Bulls the best ever, it will 70 plus 15, so the real magic number should probably be 85.
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I must interject here that this is not the first season that 70 victories has been suggested for the Bulls. This has been an annual proposition since titles became routine.
Before the 1992-93 season, I figured out with mathematical certainty and geometric logic just how the Bulls could be the first team to win 70.
Thus challenged, the Bulls promptly went out and won a mere 57 games, so I refused to count any more unhatched chickens.
Likewise, I am not ready to say this Bulls team is the best, however it all turns out, nor should that matter. Their job is to win, mine is to sum up.
I do not know that this Bulls team could beat the middle of the three title teams, but it is a recent enough comparison to argue.
Comparing this team to those Lakers or those 76ers or those Celtics is no more conclusive than will be comparing the champions of 2015 to these Bulls.
If Jason Kidd and Grant Hill and Anfernee Hardaway are not yet Pippen and Charles Barkley and Hakeem Olajuwon, nor were any of those Larry Bird and Julius Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the same position on the calendar.
Here is what I know. All basketball players today are better than all basketball players yesterday. Wilt Chamberlain, the single greatest force ever in basketball, would be Shaquille O’Neal today, one of many. Oscar Robertson would have problems bringing the ball up against Michael Jordan. Elvin Hayes could not stay with Karl Malone.
The Bulls can do nothing to change that. All the Bulls can do is raise the bar for the next generation, and it is a thing worth doing.