Jerry Krause doesn’t get enough credit for what he did with the Chicago Bulls. Not only did he not make the mistake that Houston and Portland made in not taking Michael Jordan (the Bulls took him at #3 in the 1984 draft), he quickly paired him with Scottie Pippen.
For the first three championship teams, the Bulls put guys like Bill Cartwright, Horace Grant, and John Paxson around their Dynamic Duo.
Jordan, of course, stepped away from basketball after the 1993 championship, but came back in 1995.
The team to an extent had already been rebuilt, notably with Grant being traded, but Krause again put together a brilliant group. He still had Pippen, and of course, Jordan was back. But the core of the rotation had been rebuilt, and brilliantly.
Chicago brought in shooter Steve Kerr, Aussie big man Luc Longley, Ron Harper, Dennis Rodman, and a player Krause had long coveted, Toni Kukoc.
Krause had long celebrated Kukoc, a native of Croatia, to the point where Jordan and Pippen were sick of hearing about him, so they went out of their way to shut him down when the Dream Team played Croatia in the 1992 Olympics.
But Krause wasn’t wrong: Kukoc was great. Not really good. Great.
At 6-11, Kukoc had point guard skills, as you’ll see here, and he meshed perfectly with that team. You wanted to keep Jordan and Pippen on the court as much as possible, but you could add Rodman, Kukoc, and Harper to almost anyone else on the floor and have possibly the most versatile team in NBA history.
That team really did invent positionless basketball, and did it decades before the term was even considered.
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