The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith

5.8 rebounds in the five games. And with time expiring in Game 5, he hit a hanging jumper to give the Bulls a 1-point victory. The moment became known in Chicago sports history as “the shot,” ranking with Jordan’s other “shot” in the 1982 NCAA tournament, a twenty-foot jumper that gave North Carolina a last-second victory over Georgetown. It also sent the Cavaliers plummeting; over the next two seasons, they would not defeat the Bulls once.
    The playoffs had become Jordan’s stage. He was Bob Hope and Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra. His play transcended the game. It was a sweet melody received with a grand ovation. Others jumped as high and almost everyone slammed the ball, but Jordan did it with a style and a smile and a flash and a wink, and he did it best in the postseason.
    â€œThere’s always been the feeling on this team,” Bach had said after that Cavaliers series, “that if we got to the Finals, Michael would figure out some way to win it. He’s the greatest competitor I’ve ever seen and then he goes to still another level in the big games.”
    It was true: Jordan’s playoff performances had been Shakespearean sonnets, beautiful and timeless. And like Shakespeare, he was the best even though everyone said so. In just his second season in the league, after missing sixty-four games with a broken foot, Jordan demanded to return to the court despite warnings by doctors that he might exacerbate the injury to his foot. The Bulls, and even Jordan’s advisers, said he should sit out the rest of the season. Jordan angrily accused the team of not wanting to make the playoffs so it could get a better draft pick. He was reluctantly allowed to return with only fifteen games remaining in the regular schedule. The Bulls made the playoffs, and in Game 2 against the Boston Celtics (who would go on to win the NBA title) Jordan scored 63 points. Larry Bird put it this way: “It must be God disguised as Michael Jordan.”
    In the 1988 playoffs against the Cavaliers, Jordan opened the series with 50- and 55-point games, the first time anyone had ever scored back-to-back 50s in the playoffs, to lead the team to victory and establish an all-time five-game-playoff-series scoring record of 45.2 points per game. Jordan had become perhaps the greatest scorer in the game’s history. He would never equal Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game or his hundred-plus 50-point games, but by the end of the 1990–91 season, Jordan had become the all-time NBA scoring average leader in the regular season, the playoffs, and the All-Star game. And he’d won his fifth straight scoring title, putting him behind only Chamberlain’s seven.
    And now, facing the Pistons in 1990, he was coming off a series against the 76ers in the second round of the playoffs that was unbelievable even by his own amazing standards. The Bulls won in five games as Jordan averaged 43 points, 7.4 assists, and 6.6 rebounds. He shot nearly 55 percent in 42.5 minutes per game. He drove and he dunked. He posted up and buried jumpers. He blocked shots and defended everyone from Charles Barkley to Johnny Dawkins.
    â€œI never played four consecutive games like I did against Philly,” he said of the first four, in which he led the team in scoring in thirteen of sixteen quarters.
    And then the Bulls, storming and snorting, headed for Detroit to take on the Pistons. The two teams hailed from hard-edged, blue-collar towns, Chicago with its broad shoulders and meat-packing history, Detroit with its recession-prone auto industry. For some reason, though, Detroit’s sports teams seemed to have a perpetual edge over Chicago’s. In 1984 the Cubs finally won a piece of a baseball title, but it was the Detroit Tigers who won the World Series, just as they had in 1945, the year of the Cubs’ last World Series appearance. Many times Gordie Howe’s Detroit Red Wings had come into the