The Houston Rockets won the 1994 championship with an asterisk for the ages It was the year Michael Jordan walked away from hoops to play baseball after leading Chicago to its first three-peat Would Hakeem, Rudy T and company have won their first ring if MJ hadn’t retired? It’s not a simple question Besides Olajuwon’s immense talent, the Rockets were a tough team to defend They embraced spacing and the three-point shot like no other team in the NBA had before Leading the league in three-pointers attempted and made in their back-to-back championship runs Rudy Tomjanovich even had a then very rare stretch four in Robert Horry Could the Bulls have stopped them? Probably, they were a sneaky great defensive team They never had a Hakeem stopper, but they could have made up for it in other areas Especially with a couple of all-time perimeter defenders in Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen But Houston was never a good matchup for the Bulls, even when they were dominating the league In fact, between 1990-91 and 1992-93, the Rockets won five of six games against Chicago And most important, the Rockets were a young, hungry team ready to take the league by storm While the Bulls, and most particularly Michael Jordan, had shown signs of burnout The Rockets weren’t unbeatable anyway, needing seven games to beat the Knicks in the Finals Precisely the amount of games the MJ-less Bulls forced against New York in the Eastern semifinals At the end of the day, all would have come down to Michael Jordan’s motivation And it was clear His Airness needed that year off to fall in love with basketball again
Rockets vs. Bulls
The Houston Rockets won the 1994 championship with an asterisk for the ages It was the year Michael Jordan walked away from hoops to play baseball after leading Chicago to its first three-peat Would Hakeem, Rudy T and company have won their first ring if MJ hadn’t retired? It’s not a simple question Besides Olajuwon’s immense talent, the Rockets were a tough team to defend They embraced spacing and the three-point shot like no other team in the NBA had before Leading the league in three-pointers attempted and made in their back-to-back championship runs Rudy Tomjanovich even had a then very rare stretch four in Robert Horry Could the Bulls have stopped them? Probably, they were a sneaky great defensive team They never had a Hakeem stopper, but they could have made up for it in other areas Especially with a couple of all-time perimeter defenders in Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen But Houston was never a good matchup for the Bulls, even when they were dominating the league In fact, between 1990-91 and 1992-93, the Rockets won five of six games against Chicago And most important, the Rockets were a young, hungry team ready to take the league by storm While the Bulls, and most particularly Michael Jordan, had shown signs of burnout The Rockets weren’t unbeatable anyway, needing seven games to beat the Knicks in the Finals Precisely the amount of games the MJ-less Bulls forced against New York in the Eastern semifinals At the end of the day, all would have come down to Michael Jordan’s motivation And it was clear His Airness needed that year off to fall in love with basketball again