“The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan and the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, presents that season as one that management declared would be the final chapter of the dynasty before it even began.
The series, which concludes Sunday night with Episodes 9 and 10, has left viewers to ponder how long the Bulls could have kept winning championships if management (aka general manager Jerry Krause) had not been so intent on breaking up the team.
The reality, however, is a bit more complicated, especially considering Jordan severed a tendon in his right index finger during the summer after the 1998 championship, an injury that has become a footnote over time.
While Jordan denied at the time that his injured finger played a role in his decision to retire, he also revealed during his second retirement news conference in January 1999 that the finger would require surgery that would sideline him for two months. A lockout shortened the NBA season to 50 games that year, which would have given Jordan very little time to get back on the court before the playoffs.
Jordan offered few details at the time on how he suffered the injury, but during an interview in 2000 he said he sliced his finger with a cheap cigar cutter during a vacation in the Bahamas. He had trouble gripping his golf clubs, and the injury still bothered him more than a year later.
He also admitted the injury hampered his ability to palm a basketball.
“I can still shoot,” Jordan told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2000. “But I can’t grip the ball completely. I have a tough time picking it up off the dribble like I used to.”
Jordan maintains that by the time he suffered the injury, he already had decided to hang it up, even though his announcement didn’t come until later in the offseason. It’s another reason the Bulls — who did try to sign the championship core to one-year deals for the next season — were ready to move forward with a rebuild after their sixth title: They were sure Jordan was ready to walk away again.
Krause, who died in 2017, also expressed doubts about Jordan’s ability to play with the injury in an excerpt from his unpublished and unfinished memoirs that his family shared with NBC Sports Chicago.
“To his everlasting credit, at the end of his time with the Bulls, he could have really screwed the franchise big time and he didn’t,” Krause wrote. “In the summer after winning the last championship, he’d cut his index finger of his shooting hand very badly with a cigar cutter. It was seriously questionable if he could regain enough movement in the finger to be himself again as a shooter.
“He could have easily put us in an extremely tough situation by saying he wanted to play and force us to sign him to the biggest contract in team sports history.”
The Bulls had experience playing through an extended stretch without one of their stars. In 1997-98, a disgruntled Scottie Pippen did not make his season debut until January because he delayed ankle surgery until right before the season rather than spend the summer rehabbing.
Even with Jordan, the Bulls scuffled at the beginning of that season, starting out 12-9.
Perhaps Jordan — who returned to play two more seasons for the Wizards in 2001-02 and 2002-03 — sensed that he would not be himself if he came back with the Bulls so quickly after the injury and that the burden of trying to lift them to the Finals again would have been enormous.
“It would then have been easy to go on the disabled list with the finger injury and spend the rest of that strike-shortened season picking up checks every two weeks and not playing at all,” Krause wrote. “But Michael being Michael, once he signed a contract, he gave you a thousand percent effort and would not think of stiffing you.”
