On Sunday night, the first two episodes from the long-anticipated 10-part documentary series The Last Dance premiered on ESPN. Though The Last Dance promises to reveal behind-the-scenes footage from the Chicago Bulls’ 1997-98 season—which, spoiler alert, culminates in Michael Jordan’s sixth and final NBA title—the meat of the inaugural two episodes comes in the form of basketball exposition. Specifically, the origin stories of Jordan and Scottie Pippen. We learn about their upbringings, their development into superstars, and their relationship. A whole bunch of guest speakers make appearances, including two former U.S. presidents (one from Illinois and one from Arkansas).
The juicy stuff comes in during episode two. As it turns out, to this day, Jordan and Pippen very much do not see eye to eye about how the latter handled his offseason preparations in the lead-up to their final run together.
Some context: During the 1997 Eastern Conference Finals, Pippen ruptured a tendon in his ankle, an injury he continued playing through. The Bulls ended up defeating the Utah Jazz in the NBA Finals, a six-game series in which Pippen averaged 20 points, 8 rebounds, 1.7 steals, and 1.8 blocks in 42.8 minutes per game. Then came the offseason, where the last year of Pippen’s dramatically underpaid seven-year, $22 million contract loomed. As Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, formerly a Bulls guard, says on The Last Dance, “There was a lot of anger from Scottie. He had been one of the best players in the game for many years. He had done so much for the Bulls, and his frustration bubbled over.”
Pippen didn’t have ankle surgery, at least initially. Instead, he notes, he leisurely enjoyed his summer, a middle finger move pointed directly at Bulls GM Jerry Krause, whom the documentary paints as the least-liked key cog of the Bulls dynasty. Chicago players, especially Jordan and Pippen, regularly made fun of and openly criticized Krause.
But right before the season started, Pippen opted to have the surgery after all, which put him out of action for months. Decades later, Pippen doesn’t have any regrets. “I decided to have surgery late, because I was like, ‘You know what? I’m not going to fuck my summer up trying to rehab for the season,'” he says.
Even though Jordan really wasn’t a fan of Krause, he vehemently disagreed with the way Pippen handled his business. “Scottie was wrong in that scenario,” he says today. “He could’ve gotten surgery done as soon as the season was over… Now I got to start the season knowing Scottie wasn’t going to be around, but we have to find a way to win.” Coach Phil Jackson says in his own interview that he was actually supportive of Pippen’s choice (“Scottie probably needed to have this to feel like he justified what his salary was”), but Jackson himself was beefing with Krause in 1997, and already knew he’d be leaving the team after the season.
The drama didn’t stop with Pippen’s surgery. Krause shopped his disgruntled star around, further annoying Pippen, until Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf fatefully killed a potential trade. Pippen wasn’t satisfied though, and announced he wouldn’t play for the Bulls anymore after he was healed up. “That really is what tarnished my relationship with [Krause],” Pippen says today. “He tried to make me feel so special, but was still willing to trade me, and never would tell me to my face… I felt insulted. I sort of took the attitude of disrespecting him.”
Jordan, never one to forget a slight, was upset about Pippen’s last-second surgery in 1997, and doesn’t sound very forgiving of the ensuing trade demand either. “I felt like Scottie was being selfish,” he says in the closing minutes of episode two.
Jordan and Pippen have always seemed to respect one another—Jordan spoke at Pippen’s 2010 Hall of Fame induction ceremony—but The Last Dance makes abundantly clear that they aren’t quite on the same page about what went down at the tail end of their respective Chicago Bulls tenures.
