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“The Last Dance” documentary left fans wondering whether the Chicago Bulls executives could have brought the team back for a possible shot at a seventh NBA championship.
Team owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Michael Jordan both got their final words in on whether the team could have been brought back for a final run.
“After the sixth championship, things were beyond our control, because it would have been suicidal at that point in their careers to bring back Pippen, Steve Kerr, Rodman, Ron Harper. Their market value individually was going to be too high. They weren’t going to be worth the money they were going to get in the market,” Reinsdorf said.
“So when we realized we were going to have to go into a rebuild, I went to Phil [Jackson] and said ‘You’re welcome the opportunity to come back the next year.’ But he said, ‘I don’t want to go through a rebuild. I don’t want to coach a bad team.’ That was the end. It just came to an end on its own. Had Michael been healthy and wanted to come back, I don’t doubt that Krause could have rebuilt another championship team in a couple of years, but it wasn’t going to happen instantly.”
Jordan said he didn’t believe Reinsdorf because then-General Manager Jerry Krause already said before the start of the season that Jackson could have gone undefeated and the team wasn’t going to be back.
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“We knew they weren’t going to keep the team. Now, they could have nixed all of it at the beginning of ’98. Why say that statement at the beginning of ’98?” Jordan wondered.
He added that if everyone was offered a one-year deal to try for a seventh title, everyone including himself would have signed the deal and tried.
“If you ask all the guys who won in '98, Steve Kerr, Jud Buechler, blah blah blah, we give you a one-year contract to try for a seventh, you think they would have signed them? Yes, they would have signed them. Would I have signed for one year? Yes, I would have signed for one year. I'd been signing one-year contracts up to that. Would Phil have done it? Yes. Now Pip, you would have had to do some convincing, but if Phil was gonna be there, Dennis was gonna be there, if M.J. was gonna be there, to win our seventh? Pip is not gonna miss out on that,” he said.
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Jordan called not getting a chance at a seventh title “maddening.”