What do you see as the big similarities between this Warriors team and your Bulls teams?
What I like about what Golden State’s doing is they’re playing basketball as a team, and they seem like they have fun all the time – guys giving each other high fives, smiling all the time. And when you play a team sport, it makes it a team sport when you see other guys encouraging guys to play hard and have fun.
They are a much better 3-point shooting team than we were. We relied on being a very hard defensive team, turning our defense into offense. We were going out there playing with a chip on our shoulder.
I don’t remember you guys smiling all the time, high-fiving all the time…
Those Chicago teams we took our job as a business. We wanted to go out and just prove to people were a very good basketball team, because [in 1994-95] we got beat by Orlando at home in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. They were talking, and they were hoping to do that again. Next year we wanted to go out and show them the kind of team we had.
You gotta understand, Golden State’s coming off a championship year, a championship run. They know they’re a good basketball team. They’re going out and playing hard.
Was that the similarity? That you guys both heard the talk? They also had a bunch of people talking about how they got lucky on the way to the title last year.
You gotta understand, every team will be a little jealous about you when you win the NBA championship. Everybody’s gonna have their opinion. It’s your job to go out and prove you deserve it and you can play.
They’re doing a great job, not worrying about what the naysayers are saying. It’s early in the year still.
We have a lot of games left. You can’t lose yourself looking ahead. Somebody can get hurt, and you gotta play through those. You keep going out there each night, trying to play the same way.
When you’re in a streak, do you think about it? Do you approach the game any differently?
You don’t. You really don’t.
One thing you gotta keep doing is you gotta play. You don’t care if people won 15 games straight, 17 games straight. You keep playing those games. It’s tough to get as far as they were fortunate to get if guys get hurt. They’ve been pretty much the same way all of this year.
You just keep going, you just keep playing hoops, you go out, you smile and you play hard. It just happens. If you do lose, you played your best.
And that’s the thing, when one basketball streak ends another one gets going.
People are talking about them comparing with your 72-win team. Thoughts?
It’s a long way away (72). Let’s wait to see where they’re at the All-Star break. You don’t ever want to get ahead of yousrelf. It’s a long season, it’s a long year. No one wins the NBA championship this time of year.
You wait until you get to the All-Star break and you see how good you are. That’s what I like about that basketball team – they have a good head coach who knows that you gotta take every game as a new game.
If they were to go out and win 72 games, 73 games, we’d take our hats off to that team.
How do you stay focused? Pat Riley talks about the Disease of Me, people changing after a title. What’s the hardest part of repeating?
One thing that I like is that when we won a championship, that was my first championship and it was MJ’s 4th. I turned to him like ‘I got my first championship – I’m cool now.’ He says ‘Huh? We’re gonna win it next year. We’re gonna win as many championships as we can. We have to stay hungry.’
That’s the key. Staying hungry, you need to have guys staying hungry leading your team every day, working extremely hard – that makes you want to work harder. That’s the one thing that MJ did…he set the example, he set the tone of what kind of year it was gonna be.
If he works hard, you’ll work harder. At the end of the day, it’s ok to win a first ring, but can you win back to back rings? Then can you go back to back to back? You may win one year, and it might be a fluke. But if you win again, you show folks you deserve it.
Matchup by matchup, how do you guys match up with this Golden State team?
Our team was so versatile, and Golden State is too, but they go really small ball.
We had Scottie Pippen at 6-8, Kukoc 6-9, MJ 6-7, me 6-6…we had Rodman who was one of the better defensive players, he played power forward. We could also use Toni Kukoc who was 6-10 and could shoot the lights out with the ball.
We wouldn’t be as small, because we still got big men in there. What they do works now in this basketball game, and what our team did then worked too.
But I prefer my basketball team over any team.
How would you guard Steph?
One thing about Steph is that he’s a great shooter. We know how he can play. We know he shoots extremely well.
One thing we’d like to do is keep Steph from coming off screen and rolls. We’d like to push Steph to the other side of the floor he doesn’t like to be on. You can never say you’re gonna hold a guy from scoring, but you want him to work on every shot he has.
He’s gonna have a hand up, he’s gonna have a guy in his face, it’s gonna be me, Randy Brown, Scottie, Steve Kerr, Rodman. We felt that with five of us on the floor we could match up 1 through 5.
We did find a way to be part of a good team.
How important is winning a title for a legacy?
If you play 6-7 years in this league and you haven’t gotten past the first round, you feel like your NBA talent has been a bust. I’m sure we all feel the same way – in a career, you want to play for championships. You want to win championships.
That’s all anybody talks about it. They never talk like, he made that money, he made so many All-Star games. They talk about all the championships he has. You ask Karl Malone, Charles Barkley. They’d trade in their All-Stars for an NBA championship ring
You’re gonna be in Canada this week for the All-Star tour. What are your thoughts about it?
I’m very excited to get a chance to come over there, to see the young players and NBA fans. What we always try to do is make everybody feel like they’re a part of what we do.
The NBA is a global ballgame, we try to get everyone those experiences. I think my job was to talk to young kids, about how our game is…we got a lot of international basketball players in our game now, and we want to encourage kids to chase whatever dreams they have.
You played the Raptors when they were an expansion franchise. What do you remember from Toronto?
The Skydome was a very, very unique experience. I think they still hold the attendance record. They had a great young basketball team. The fans always were great there, they always treated us well….when the NBA All-Star Game is there, they’re gonna get the same kind of atmosphere that our team had there.
