A Necessary Evil

We needed Darth Vader.

(Yes, another Star Wars reference. I swear I don't love the franchise this much, it just comes in handy for analogies. But I digress.)

We needed Darth Vader. We needed him to chop Luke's arm off. We needed him to crush the Rebel Alliance.

We needed the Evil Empire.

Just as the New York Post suggested, the ultimate triumph of good against evil would not have been possible without, well, evil. For the Jets to overcome, the Patriots had to exist as the personification of decadence and dominance. And they absolutely had to humiliate the Jets like they did in November.

So all Chicago Bulls fans still stinging after the loss to Miami, listen to me.

We need LeBron James.

Hurdles

A few minutes after the Bulls surrendered a 12-point fourth-quarter lead to Miami in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals, I fought the oncoming catatonic state that was taking over my body and made a pointed Facebook status.

It read:

"1988. 1989. 1990. We will return."

The generation of Bulls fans who remember the days prior to the Jordan Renaissance is growing more scant every day, but they're still out there. They remember when red, white and black wasn't the premier color scheme for any Nike shoe. They remember when Converse and Adidas reigned and there was no such thing as an Air Jordan. When Chicago Stadium was a drafty old barn that hadn't seen a championship since Bobby Hull.

The days when, as Sam Smith says in his book The Jordan Rules, the late Johnny "Red" Kerr would have to call the Chicago papers to spell players' names after games for the box score.

Save for a few close years in the mid-'70s, the Bulls were an afterthought before Jordan. And even after he did jump-start the Bulls, glory did not come easy.

Off the hardwood, sportswriters said a team with no star center or distributing point guard could ever win a championship. On the court, the Detroit Pistons were doing their best to prove the critics right.

Those three years mark the successive seasons in which the Pistons knocked the Bulls out of the playoffs. First in five games, then six, then a heartbreaking seven-game series at the turn of the decade. Detroit had Chicago's number, and they knew it.

This was the mental hurdle the Bulls—and Jordan—had to clear. He had famously broken the Cleveland Cavaliers with "The Shot" in 1989 (Smith writes in Rules that the Cavs would not beat the Bulls once until Jordan's first retirement), and the Celtics' dominance was at an end. The Pistons and their "Bad Boy" tactics stood in Jordan's way for three straight years.

Until the breakthrough.

One distinct play may have sealed it, but the Bulls finally defeated Detroit in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals. The rest is, of course, history.

New enemies

Twenty years later, the Bulls are once again trying to climb the mountain after 14 years of relative anonymity. Save for one year in the mid-2000s, Chicago had not made it to the second round of the playoffs since the last year of the Dynasty.

This would be the year the Bulls would finally revisit the mountaintop.

They had seemingly disheartened the faux-triumvirate in Miami after three nail-biting regular season victories. They had the top seed in the playoffs. They played hard-nosed defense at every position and they had the Most Valuable Player.

But the Heat would have the last laugh, and Chicago would be sent packing.

People forget that Jordan and the Bulls did have their moments of regular season triumph against Detroit, only to go down swinging come springtime. Same was true for the Cavs before the breakthrough in '89. Just as sportscasters say shooters need to see one go in before they can start hitting shots, the Bulls needed to see an enemy defeated before they could start running through the league with regularity.

These Miami Heat are not those Detroit Pistons. (A more fitting Miami team would be that of the late '90s: Alonzo Mourning, Tim Hardaway, P.J. Brown. Those guys could throw shots with the best of them.) But they are standing in the way of the Bulls, and if Miami wins the chip this year, they will be the team to beat for the coming future. The Bulls will have no choice but to gameplan for them every year.

(Ed. note: Interestingly enough, the roles have almost been completely reversed (from a Chicago fan's perspective) from that of the old Bulls-Pistons rivalry. The Bulls are now the hard-nosed defensive team led by their star point guard and other adept role players, while the Heat are the finesse guys with two top stars and an unsung shooter (who'd have thought Chris Bosh could ever be connected with John Paxson?) and a "doberman" defense anchored by Wade and James.)

The face of the franchise

As the Bulls' 15-point lead dwindled away in Game 5, it was LeBron James leading the charge, hitting shot after shot. Remember those faces Knicks fans always made when Jordan (and sometimes, Reggie Miller) made deficits disappear against New York in the '90s? Those were the faces we were all making at the end of that game.

All because of LeBron James.

It's not so much the Heat the Bulls will have to defeat. Dwyane Wade is and will be a great player for his career and Chris Bosh will contribute under the radar. But it is James (who knocked the Bulls out last year with Cleveland with another cold-blooded performance) whom Chicago will have to eliminate in order to get ahead.

Luke needed Darth Vader in order to triumph. Our own young "skywalker" needs LeBron James.

See you in the cheap seats.

JS