What do you get when you take away the world's greatest basketball player from the world's greatest whiner? Well, you get of course, the one, the only, the ordinary, Scottie Pippen. Had Scottie Pippen been asked the question, "Now that MJ has retired, Scottie, what are you going to do?" he probably would have responded with, "I'm going to Houston. Err, L.A. Well, maybe Portland." In one of the most blatant cases of the pot calling the kettle black in professional sports, last week Pippen referred to Charles Barkley as "selfish." A few days later Scottie got exactly what he wanted: a one-way ticket out of Houston.
Don't forget that this Scottie Pippen, who was traded for six Portland Trailblazers (among them Walt Williams, Stacey Augmon and Carlos Rogers), is the same player who decided to sit out the last 1.8 seconds of a game against the New York Knicks during the 1994 NBA Playoffs because he was upset that Toni Kukoc would be taking the final shot instead of him. This seemed rather surprising to me considering that Pippen has not made or attempted many last-second game-winning (or losing) shots in his career. The man he vilified, Charles Barkley, on the other hand, has been known to hit many clutch shots over the course of his career.
Without a doubt Pippen is a future Hall of Famer and one of the game's greatest defensive small forwards. He is a dynamo who brings a plethora of skills to the table such as passing, rebounding and a sweet outside touch. But is he worth six players, even if they are mostly mediocre, at this stage in his career, way past his prime? Not only that, Pippen seems like the epitome of the great support player, but not really a player who can single handedly lead his team to the promised land. This is not the Pippen of several years ago, nor is he bringing "His Airness" along with him to Portland. Playing without Jordan, the Bulls were just an ordinary playoff team with Pippen.
Throughout his career people have questioned whether Scottie has the mental toughness to win a championship, with or without Jordan. He has silenced his critics who said he couldn't win one, but now after having won six with Michael, he has yet to prove he can win one without him, the same task former Bulls coach Phil Jackson is now facing as new head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. During the Bulls' fierce rivalry in the '80s with their nemesis the "bad boys" from Detroit, Scottie was labeled a "soft" player as Pistons players would push and shove Scottie around to get into his psyche and take him out of his game. Scottie was rattled so much so that in one playoff game against the Pistons he was unable to play because of a migraine during the game.
Scottie Pippen has always been able to shoot his mouth off in the past because he would have Jordan there to back him up like an AK-47 hidden behind a trench coat. Now that M.J. is long gone, it's time for Pippen to either put up or shut up. He burned all his bridges in Houston this past season by constantly complaining about the team's offensive system. He hated the post-up style offense used by head coach Rudy Tomjanovich to get the ball to Charles Barkley and Hakeem Olajuwon. Pippen rejected Tomjanovich's system, criticizing it for a lack of player movement away from the ball and wanting to go back to the triangle offense the Bulls implemented in Chicago. I think Scottie forgot, however, that one of the reasons why the triangle offense worked so well for the Bulls was because Jordan was always there to bail them out during an unproductive set offense as the shot clock was expiring.
One shouldn't look a gift in the mouth, and that is exactly what Pippen did when he traded verbal barbs with Charles Barkley last week. It was Sir Charles who took a pay cut last year in order to make Pippen's salary fit under the Rockets' salary cap so that the team could trade for him, so the notion that Charles has no drive to win a championship is preposterous. Barkely can be called a lot of things because he is by no means a model citizen, but the one thing he is not is a quitter, a word that can easily be used to describe Pippen right about now.
Scottie Pippen quit on Charles Barkley and the entire Houston franchise, a team that did everything in its power to acquire him last offseason. All season long and throughout this past offseason, rumors persisted that Pippen would be shipped to L.A. Unfortunately, to his chagrin, Scottie did get sent further out west, but it wasn't to the Lakers. Maybe we should all send him sympathy cards?
Pippen's numbers were down right across the board for the Rockets: and yet Scottie was quick to call Barkley "a very selfish guy. He doesn't show the desire to want to win. That's my reason for wanting to get away from playing with him anymore because he just doesn't show the dedication."
If there was a sad sack, selfish, chronic complainer in Houston -- rest assured it wasn't Charles Barkley. Until he has won a championship for another team, the spectre of Michael Jordan looming over Pippen just won't go away. There still is no M or J in Scottie Pippen.
