Double jeopardy is useful as a game-show gimmick, important as a legal concept, but downright wicked as the NBA playoffs.
Not that the Bulls should be complaining. That’s my job. After a season of proving themselves the best team in basketball present and past, the Bulls now have do it all over again.
Miss America only has to win her title once. No one asked Secretariat to run the Triple Crown again. Tom Hanks doesn’t have to give back one Oscar when he doesn’t win two.
Only the Bulls have to prove being incredible wasn’t a fluke.
In the goofy mathematics of playoff basketball, the Bulls are not only going to have to win the world’s respect twice, if they don’t do it the second time, they will forfeit everything they gained the first time.
All that applause was not a gift, it was just a loan.
It is now double or nothing. Double the glory, sure, but double the misery too.
Failure looms more ominously than reward.
Here’s an even nuttier example of playoff math. The Bulls could lose more games in the playoffs than they won in the regular season and still win the championship.
Any of the other playoff teams will take that deal today and start planning the victory parade. The Bulls can’t afford it. The Bulls have not left themselves room to only win.
Winning it all may not be enough. When is any championship any way you can get it not adequate? When a team is playing for forever, not just for today.
The Bulls have only themselves to blame for having no exit. They could have won a respectable 60 games or even fewer. Who would have thought less of them?
All the other teams left a way out. The Rockets do not have to defend their double championship. Seattle doesn’t need to make its 65 wins mean anything more than an odd number, though getting through the first round is probably a must.
Orlando, the next generation, gets a free pass to postpone its destiny a while longer, as do the Pacers, all because the Bulls are in the way.
Only the Bulls are not starting even in the playoffs. The Bulls are starting with an ultimatum. Show us. Show us again.
If the Bulls do not continue to be as dominant through the playoffs as they were in the regular season (and to be so they can’t lose any more than two games all the way through), they slip backward from immortal to ordinary.
The Bulls are not just trying to win a fourth championship in six years, or to put it another way, a fourth full-Jordan title in a row, but they are trying to replace memories, including even memories of themselves.
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This is a challenge they did not have to face for the first three titles. Everything was a step up then. The best this can be is not a step down.
About the only way the Bulls will remove the doubts that they are indeed the best team ever is to go undefeated from Friday to the middle of June.
If 72-10 had any immediate benefit, the Bulls would sit back and wait for the rest of the NBA to sort out a suitable challenger, like Mike Tyson does.
But no, the Bulls have to make the same journey as all the rest. The Bulls are, in theory and in Alonzo Mourning’s mind, no better than the Miami Heat, the next-to-last entry into the playoffs.
Mourning was pointing out the other day how the Heat had beaten the Bulls on a night when Miami had only eight players, ignoring the other three nights when the Heat lost with all the players it needed.
Obviously there is more convincing that must be done.