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What would you do if you were the boss? The 1998 Bulls were asked, and they answered.

Not boss of the Bulls.

Boss of the NBA.

The 1997-98 Bulls yearbook includes profile pages on every player, complete with a questionnaire. Among the questions:

The team’s 13 veterans, at that point, gave responses: Randy Brown, Jud Buechler, Scott Burrell, Jason Caffey, Ron Harper, Michael Jordan, Steve Kerr, Joe Kleine, Toni Kukoc, Luc Longley, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Bill Wennington. I’ve grouped them in six categories.

We’ll do the first three today and the next three next week.

• Randy Brown: “Shorten that damn three-point line again.”

• Steve Kerr: “Now that the three-point arc has been moved back, I would not change any of the rules.”

What this was all about: The NBA adopted the three-point shot in 1979-80, using the distance from its former rival league, the ABA: 23 feet, 9 inches, and 22 feet on the sideline. That was the distance until the 1994-95 season, when the NBA shortened the arc to an even 22 feet all the way around before pushing it back to 23’9 before the ‘97-’98 season.

The impact was huge; at a time when three-point shooting fell to specialists (Kerr, Craig Hodges, B.J. Armstrong, Michael Adams) or stars with known range (Larry Bird, Reggie Miller, Mitch Richmond), shortening the line had everybody launching.

In 1994, before the change, NBA teams averaged 9.9 three-point attempts per game, the closest the league had gotten to 10 attempts. In 1995, NBA teams averaged 15.3 attempts, followed by 16 in 1996 and 16.8 in 1997. That dropped to 12.7 in 1998 and didn’t exceed the high from 1997 until 2007.

On the individual level, before the three-point line came in, the season record for attempts was held by the aforementioned Michael Adams, who attempted 564 in 1991. Vernon Maxwell (510 in 1991) and Dan Majerle (503 in 1994) were the only other players to attempt 500 3s in a season. In 1995, John Starks set the new NBA record with 611 attempts, and the next year, George McCloud broke that record with 678 attempts.

That record would stand for 20 years, when finally Steph Curry shattered it with 886 3-point attempts in his unanimous MVP year.

Randy Brown was a great example of the league-wide volume increase. A rookie in 1992, Brown shot 2-16 total from three in his first three seasons. From 1995 to 1997 on the shorter line, Brown shot 19-80; that was a .238 3P% compared to .125 his first three years, but conventional wisdom at the time was that the 57 points on the made 3s were less impactful than the 61 misses.

In 1998, with the line moved back to 23’9, Brown attempted just five 3s, making none.

Surprise! The Bulls have the greatest three-point game in NBA Finals history

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June 20, 2022

What this was all about: This was a nice bit of teammate support! Rodman had a tough 1997 with the league, much of it his own doing. Already a man with a reputation with refs and the league office, Rodman’s encounters with HR, as it were, hit stratospheric levels in 1997. In January, the league suspended him 11 games and fined him $25,000 for kicking a cameraman after an out-of-bounds collision, while during the Finals against the Jazz, the league fined him $50,000 for disparaging comments about Mormons and the Mormon religion.

Those were the two largest fines in NBA history, and were not Rodman’s only infractions. In the 1997 playoffs, he accrued 18 technical fouls in 19 games, including a stretch of 13 straight games with a technical foul, along with three ejections.

Yes, much of this was Rodman’s fault. But because of his actions and reputation, refs were on the lookout for his behavior and at times seemed to have a quick whistle with #91. That’s what Buechler was responding to.

"Bad As I Wanna Be" — the media chaos of Dennis Rodman's bestselling memoir

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April 28, 2023

Easily the most popular topic had to do with player contracts. There were five responses on the subject but they varied, so let’s break them up, starting with these two:

Let’s start with Scott Burrell’s request to make as much money as David Stern, and Bill Wennington’s request to make more money generally. According to both HoopsHype and Basketball Reference, Burrell made $1.43 million in 1998 while Wennington made $1.8 million.

David Stern, meanwhile, was in the second year (I think) of a five-year contract that was reported from $30-45 million total, giving him a low-end estimate of $6 million per year.

Stern signed that deal in February of 1996. Free agent-to-be Michael Jordan’s response?

“I could use his agent.”

Ladies and gentlemen: Jason “The Prophet” Caffey!

Or perhaps just an astute tracker of labor negotiations.

In the fall of 1997, the NBA salary cap was $26.9 million, the league faced a looming labor stoppage the next year, and Jason Caffey was the 10th highest paid Bulls player at $850,920.

Over the next 12 months, each of those elements would be transformed. On February 19, to Michael Jordan’s disgust and Phil Jackson’s ultimate disappointment, Jerry Krause traded Caffey to the Warriors. Four months later, Caffey’s ex-teammates won another championship. One month after that, in a fight over NBA salary levels and structures (“It was all about the money.”), the NBA owners locked out the players, a work stoppage that lasted to January 1999.

Instead of setting a hard salary cap, the agreement between the owners and the players established a new cap on individual player salaries while raising the minimum wage for both rookies and veterans. The deal was widely regarded as a loss for NBA superstars, a win for the owners and a win for lower-paid players.

When the lockout ended, teams got back to the business of… business. On January 21 alone, 25 teams made a total of 56 signings. The 24-year-old Caffey, a free agent, had played 29 games in 1998 with the Warriors, averaging nearly 11 points and six rebounds per game. This put him statistically near other young power forwards Maurice Taylor, Danny Fortson and Bo Outlaw. Fortson, the #10 pick overall in 1997, made the most of those four in 1998 at $1.29 million.

In the the 1997 free agent power forward or small center class a year before, Sacramento’s Brian Grant went to Portland for $63m/7 while the Bulls’s Brian Williams went to the Pistons for $45m/7. Grant had averaged 14-7 in under 30 minutes over three years with the Kings, while Williams was a 16-8 man on 54% shooting on the Clippers in 1996, sat out much of the 1997 season due to a contract dispute and caught on with the Bulls for the final nine games and the playoffs, providing a dynamic low-post game with five double-digit scoring games in the playoffs in mid-level minutes.

Caffey had played well enough in 1997 to start five playoff games in place of a demoted Dennis Rodman, and put up solid numbers in Golden State. I wouldn’t say he was at the level of Grant and Williams, but he was a reliable contributor. Presumably due to the new player salary structures, the Warriors signed Caffey for closer to Brian Williams money than Danny Fortson money, at $35 million over seven years.

• Ron Harper: “I would reward the veteran players who have built this league but who have not yet received their full market value.”

• Scottie Pippen: “I would ensure that proven veteran players are taken care of before rookies who haven’t played in an NBA game.”

These make an interesting pair. Harper does not seem to be talking about himself like Burrell and Wennington clearly are. He had fair market value with the Bulls and was tied for the team’s second highest paid player after Jordan, 45th in the NBA at $4.56 million.

But Pippen is certainly talking about himself, as he was famously the 6th highest paid Bull and 122nd highest paid player in the NBA despite being 1st team All-NBA three times and 1st team All-Defensive team four times over the past four seasons. As he wrote in Unguarded:

“The fall of 1997 was another of those periods in which I’d simply had enough of the lying and the disrespect and was convinced my only chance for happiness — and the payday I deserved as one of the game’s elite players — was somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

Lastly, I haven’t written here about the outrageous booing of Jerry Krause during the Ring of Honor ceremony, but I did get to chop it up with my guy Mark Carman on Krause’s legacy:

Have a great weekend!

Best,

Jack

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