In reply to: I particularly enjoyed the look at Pippen. posted by tdiddy07
I see 30 minutes from Foster and Blount, amounting to only 6.7 boards and 9 points. That was certainly a notably weaker team even with Jordan than the championship teams.
I was too busy paying attention to the Rockets in those years. I remember Pippen complaining about not taking the last shot in crunch time, so I didn't realize how much playing time he got alongside Kukoc based on the minutes.
titles in 94 and 95 regardless. In addition to the Rockets just generally being a bad match up for the Bulls (1-5 versus Rockets during their first three-peat), the 93/94 and 94/95 Bulls without Rodman were pretty weak in the front court.
I would have liked their chances versus any team, including Houston without Drexler.
Now the 94-95 team, yeah that's a different story with Kukoc playing big minutes at the 4.
The Bulls and the Rockets had the same regular season record in 94-95.
Both of them added "really good 2 guards" to make them much better than their record. Drexler was not rusty and he more size/depth around him than Jordan.
They won the title from a #6 seed in the Western Conference. They were the road team in every series - Utah, Phoenix, San Antonio, and then Orlando.
They threw tremendous amounts of shade, too, which was kind of out of character for Rudy T and Olajuwon. Who can forget pissing off the Suns so much that Danny Ainge bounced an inbounds off of Mario Elie's face? [ETA: that was actually the year before] Or the San Antonio series, where Olajuwon removed all doubt regarding his status in the big man pantheon by dominating (and that might be too gentle of a description) David Robinson? And my personal favorite, when the Rockets blared "It's a Small World, After All" as the theme music during Orlando's introduction at the Summit in game 3. The look on Shaq's face was priceless - It was clear that the series ended right there.
Like others have said, the Rockets were a terrible matchup for the Bulls during the first 3 titles. However, while the Rockets beat better teams on the way to the finals than the Bulls did (the West was really strong by then), a Jordan-led Bulls team on a mission was a very different finals matchup from either Ewing's choking Knicks or the really green Magic team led by Shaq and Penny.
I can't say that the Rockets would have won both titles going away, but the perception that Houston's titles are somehow tainted because Jordan was away is grossly unfair to a couple of really good Rockets teams.
* One of the funnier realizations from typing this is that while Kenny Smith gets a bunch of good natured ribbing from Chuck and Shaq on the Inside the NBA set, Smith's Rockets beat both Barkley's Suns and Shaq's Magic on the way to 2 titles.
no matter what version of MJ they had.
Like you said, just a horrible matchup in the frontcourt but it was also a shooting mismatch from 3.
People forget that Bulls team was 33-31 when MJ came back.