Curtain calls are inevitably sad and meager stuff, both an effort to bestow and an effort to receive for they signify the finish. They are full of loud and rueful wishes that there could be more. The greater the achievement, the greater the regret.
The Bulls have chosen this way to go out, all the Bulls who matter, Jordan, Jackson and Pippen, too, eventually. Even Rodman, who should not have bothered.
One last turn around the league, a farewell tour and ultimate encore, well deserved and ritually required.
Ah, if only there were not basketball games to get in the way. What’s a season for, if not to take bows?
There have been no boos yet, but compassionate heads have turned and wishful eyes have closed. Silence is a kindness. Pity is a promise.
This will get better and this will get worse. What it never will get is the way it was.
The last memory is yet to be made for the Bulls. It waits somewhere on the other side of winter, not an ending worth rushing to.
This is how goofy the journey is a mere eight games from that distant end: The Washington Wizards gloat with a losing record and the Bulls shrug at mediocrity.
The Cleveland Cavaliers look up from below the Bulls and see tomorrow. The Bulls look out and see yesterday.
The Atlanta Hawks pretend to be the next Bulls, unbeaten and uninteresting. Mookie. Mookie. Mookie.
NBA teams are circling calendar dates, not just for the Bulls as an attraction but the Bulls as a comfort station.
This is just exactly what the Jerrys anticipated, a team of relics stumbling early and standing on their own tongues at the end. The Bulls are not defying this opinion, but confirming it.
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Well, at least someone in the organization can be self-satisfied.
Can it all have gone so bad so quickly? Sure, it could. This is a team without the resilience of the young nor the appetite of the ambitious.
This is a team, to quote coach Phil Jackson, gripped by “malaise,” another word for been there, done that, another word for mortal, another word for inevitable.
The Bulls are a team once challenged by history, now challenged by the calendar, not the same sort of motivation.
With Scottie Pippen the Bulls are a team trying to prove the world, and their owners, wrong. Without Pippen, the Bulls are a team confirming the world is right.
It cannot be known what difference a healthy Pippen would make at the moment, though I suspect at least one or two more victories. It is Pippen’s defense that is missed most.
And the Bulls have not exactly had to open the season against the next great things in the NBA, no matter what Atlanta might think of itself.
But would a couple more victories change the essential truth of the Bulls? This is a team too bored to bother.
Dennis Rodman should not be the barometer in this matter, or any matter for that matter, but he does seem to illustrate the point well. Showing up late to a game wearing pajamas would indicate a lack of urgency to get to the task at hand.
It is as if all the Bulls are sleeping in. The job now is mundane, just another dreary chore. The Bulls are headliners being asked to hang the lights. Aren’t there enough little people to do that?
Losing games may be enough to reacquaint the Bulls with the necessary intensity to take on opponents who are inspired by the Bulls’ legend as much as the Bulls are leaning on it. But more than likely, it will take the playoffs to do it.
Maybe the championship round. Maybe Game 7.
Yeah. That should do it.