NBA 75: At No. 32, Scottie Pippen's journey to becoming one of the NBA's best all-around players wasn't easy (2024)

(Editor’s note: Welcome back to The Athletic NBA 75. We’re re-running our top 40 players to count down every day from Sept. 8-Oct. 17, the day before the opening of the 2022-23NBA season. This piece was first published on Jan. 6, 2022.)

On Oct. 28, 1993, Scottie Pippen took what was his.

That was the night of Pippen’s first game without Michael Jordan, a meaningless preseason exhibition game against the Los Angeles Clippers. Before the game, with reporters in the locker room, Pippen emptied Jordan’s spacious double locker, combing through the detritus of a legend to comedic effect.

Pippen pulled out a Jordan T-shirt and asked the media, “Here, anyone want to dry their tears?” He found some old candy bars, musing that he might have to try them to see if he could get blessed with magical powers.

But mostly, he seemed happy to take over the prime real estate afford to a sporting king. The throne now belonged to Pippen.

“Michael, I love you, but I’m glad to see you go,” he said with a laugh, according to former Bulls beat writer Melissa Isaacson’s book on the post-Jordan Bulls, “Transition Game.”

During the 1993-94 season, with Jordan trying to solve the mysteries of baseball’s slider in the Southern League, Pippen earned his locker, taking the Bulls to the brink of the NBA Finals, finishing third in MVP voting and winning the All-Star Game MVP. The Bulls were a Hue Hollins phantom foul call on Pippen away from making a sixth-straight trip to the Eastern Conference finals. But Pippen also combusted at the worst possible time, earning him a black mark on a reputation he bristles at today.

Pippen thrived and suffered in that brief window of time where he had the spotlight to himself. Those who observed him saw the tension in Pippen’s world. He was, at times, resentful of Jordan’s imperious persona, but he played his role as the perfect partner — don’t say sidekick — to his more talented teammate.

“God, I hated that term and being referred to as Robin to his Batman,” he wrote in the prologue to his recent book, “Unguarded.”

Pippen was now “The Man,” trying to fill shoes that would forever be too big. Even today, No. 33’s relationship with No. 23 defines Pippen’s legacy, however you choose to see it.

So what is Pippen’s legacy?

A six-time NBA champion? A Hall of Famer? A top-75 player? A rags-to-riches, only-in-America story?

Is he a star on his own merit? Or is he “just” one of the greatest complementary players in NBA history?

All of those things, of course. Scottie contains multitudes, that’s always been his strength and his weakness.

He was a point guard in a forward’s body, a scorer, a rebounder, a defender, a leader, a complainer.

Off the court, he could be an enigma. On the court, he was irreplaceable.

“You talk about people who changed the game and how people play today,” said Bulls broadcaster Stacey King, who played with Pippen for five seasons. “So you look at Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain changed the game. Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) changed the game. Michael changed the game. Scottie doesn’t get the credit for his role in changing the game. Scottie’s tree, for how he played, has the Grant Hills of the world, the Kevin Durants.

“You know these guys who can defend, they can score. They can rebound, assist. There’s been a ton of players that have come along that are in that Scottie Pippen point forward mode.”

Pippen, who comes in at No. 32 on The Athletic’s NBA 75, grew up in poverty in rural Hamburg, Ark., one of a dozen children. His father died when Pippen was 13, 10 years after his older brother Ronnie was paralyzed as a 13-year-old.

“I wish I experienced one of the idyllic childhoods so common in the small-town America of the late 1960s and early 1970s,” he wrote in his book. “But I didn’t.”

Pippen persevered and went to the University of Central Arkansas, a small school with no road to the NBA, especially not when Pippen started as a de facto team manager. But it was there that his unlikely success story really started. He grew to 6-foot-7, and he worked his way into being an NBA prospect.

When Jerry Krause — who was tipped off about him by NBA scouting legend Marty Blake — saw Pippen in person for the first time at the Portsmouth Invitational, a pre-draft scouting combine, he tapped his scout Billy McKinney and said, “That’s got to be Pippen.” How did Krause know? “Those are the longest arms I’ve ever seen,” McKinney told David Halberstam for his book, “Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan & The World He Made.”

Pippen’s star rose once people got a look at him, and the Bulls worked out a trade with the Seattle SuperSonics to get him with the fifth pick in the first round of the 1987 NBA Draft.

As Halberstam wrote in his book, when Bulls strength coach Al Vermeil first worked him out before the draft, he saw Pippen had a rare elasticity and fluidity to his movements, which made it seem like he wasn’t expending energy as he ran. During his rookie season, it felt like he and Jordan had a teacher-student relationship, as Jordan tried to impart his North Carolina training on the more raw Pippen. As former Bulls coach Doug Collins noted, according to Halberstam, Jordan had “virtually cloned” himself with Pippen, creating a defensive-minded, tough swingman.

And maybe that led to some resentment on Pippen’s part as he learned what it was like to play in Jordan’s ever-expanding shadow. Students come to resent teachers, and Jordan lorded over his teammates with his confidence, his power and his limitless wealth.

“He actually had this curious ambivalence with Jordan,” said Sam Smith, who covered Pippen’s entire Bulls career and wrote the classic book, “The Jordan Rules.” “He wanted to be accepted and part of Jordan’s orbit, and I think that stemmed from, as a lot of it does, from where he came from. … He always really hungered for it, but Michael, being the shark he was, he would recognize that. He was so aware of people wanting to do that.

“And then he would belittle Pippen when he was trying to be considered an equal, and then Pippen would go sort of crawling back to Horace Grant and the guys because he wasn’t accepted like he wanted to be.”

Pippen and Jordan signed long-term deals that quickly became below-market contracts, but Jordan’s real money came from his outside endeavors. Meanwhile, no one was writing a jingle, “Be Like Pip.”

It likely didn’t help that when people compare the best at what they do, it’s to Jordan. If someone is the valuable partner of those people, they might be compared to Pippen.

“Who is Scottie Pippen without Michael Jordan?” is a fair question. But so is “Who is Michael Jordan without Scottie Pippen?”

You can’t tell Pippen’s story without bringing in Jordan, an immutable fact proven by Pippen himself in his book, which seems to exist only to argue that he was as good as Jordan, if not better.

Smith, knowing him so long, wasn’t surprised by Pippen’s grievance tour, but he was a little confused that he’s focused his ire on Jordan at this stage of their lives. Jordan wasn’t the cuddliest teammate but has usually praised Pippen in public. In Jordan’s polarizing Hall of Fame speech, for example, Pippen was the first person he mentioned.

“In all the videos,” he said of the highlights that preceded his speech, “you never just saw me, you saw Scottie Pippen. Every championship I won.”

Pippen’s reputation in NBA circles was cemented when he was named to the 1992 Dream Team, which put him with the top players in the world. When Jordan returned from the Olympics in Barcelona, he raved to Phil Jackson how Pippen truly established himself in the basketball firmament with his play among the best of the best. Pippen led the team with 5.9 assists and shot nearly 60 percent from the floor, all while playing lockdown defense on overmatched opponents. After the Bulls’ fourth title, he made the NBA Top 50 team in 1996.

While he struggled with his individual identity, in the 1994-95 season, the one in which Jordan would belatedly return from his sabbatical, Pippen led the Bulls in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks. That’s a peak LeBron James/Kevin Garnett type of statistical feat. But even at Pippen’s best, it was clear the Bulls clearly needed Jordan back. He knew it, too.

During a March 9, 1995, game against the Cavaliers, Pippen lifted his foot and pointed to the Jumpman logo on his foot and then the camera, beckoning for Jordan, who was rumored to be returning to the Bulls, to come back.

Try as he might, Pippen was unwilling — and perhaps unable — to fill Jordan’s shoes as a dominant scorer. Without Jordan, Pippen averaged 17.8 shots and a career-best 22 points per game, up from just 16.4 the season before. In the 1994-95 season, he averaged 16.7 shots.

He was never MJ. He was the perfect Scottie.

Unlike Michael, who never met a scandal he couldn’t hurdle, Scottie had trouble handling the spotlight. Throughout Pippen’s career, and even today, he “seemed burdened by his inability to avoid controversy,” as Isaacson wrote in her 1994 book.

After the “Last Dance” documentary on the 1997-98 Bulls — executive produced by Jordan himself — opened up some old wounds (“He couldn’t have been more condescending if he tried,” Scottie told GQ), Pippen co-authored a book and went on a media tour best described as grievance content, not so much to correct any kind of record but to vent about his feelings of disrespect.

“There’s no doubt in my mind I was superior to Michael in both individual and team defense,” he wrote. “Of course, because the media believed Michael could do nothing wrong, he was in the running every season for the NBA Defensive Player of the Year award. I was not.”

“I was a much better teammate than Michael ever was,” he wrote in the prologue. “Ask anyone who ever played with the two of us.”

The book is lousy with that kind of narrative, and it’s a shame. While Jordan, who scored like he breathed, was a classic NBA leading man, Pippen defined his own role as a star by being a facilitator and a defender. These roles are not in conflict.

If Jordan was the one pushing his teammates, Pippen pulled them in. Together, they teamed up to win six titles neatly divided into a pair of three-peats, a number limited only by Jordan’s sabbatical and the breakup of the team.

“Pippen was unique in the contradiction that off the court, he was ‘No-Tipping Pippen’ — and I didn’t name him that, the other players named him that,” Smith said. “On the court, he couldn’t have been more unselfish. And actually, he was the perfect player of all time for Michael Jordan, the ultimate player who fits what Michael needed.”

Early in his career, Jordan wanted to have the ball in his hands because, well, he didn’t trust anyone else. But once he began to rely on Pippen to bring the ball up the court and get the offense going, Jordan realized he could expend less energy and focus on the things he did best on offense, like get buckets. Smith compared them to co-authors working seamlessly on a book.

“Scottie was more than just a No. 2,” Smith said, “and that’s probably part of the resentment. He was more like a 1A. Because he fit what Michael needed more than anybody.”

The supporting cast around them changed, but Jordan, Pippen and coach Phil Jackson remained constant. They were the triangle. The global star, the guru coach, the reticent Robin. And when it mattered the most, they couldn’t be beaten.

The Bulls went 6-0 (winning 69 percent of their games) in the NBA Finals with Jordan and Pippen. In those games, those six titles, those symmetrical three-peats for Chicago, Pippen averaged 19 points, 8.3 rebounds, 5.9 assists and 1.9 steals in 42 minutes per game.

But for Pippen, the stats are just complementary to the experience of what it was like watching him play.

“Scottie’s basketball IQ is off the charts,” King said. “Off the freaking charts.”

Defensively, he was a terror, joining Jordan and Horace Grant (in the first three-peat) and Dennis Rodman and Ron Harper (in the second) to give the Bulls shutdown defenders. The late Bulls assistant coach Johnny Bach coined the term “the Dobermans” to describe Jordan, Pippen and Grant.

By the late 1980s, NBA coaches and observers thought Pippen was already a better defender than Jordan based on his length. It was Pippen who shut down Magic Johnson in the 1991 NBA Finals, proving that the Bulls were more than the Jordan show.

“Scottie created the point forward, to be honest with you,” King said. “People say Magic because Magic was so big, but Magic was always a point guard. He wasn’t a three-man playing the point. Scottie was a small forward, he was a point forward. That’s where that got created.”

It was Pippen who told Karl Malone the mailman doesn’t deliver on Sundays in Game 1 of the 1997 NBA Finals, a mental nudge that defined the Bulls’ earned arrogance.

Pippen didn’t hit the game-winning 3-pointer in Phoenix in 1993, but he drove the lane, drew three defenders and passed to Grant in the post, who found John Paxson at the 3-point line. When it mattered, he was always in the mix, facilitating, defending, playing basketball.

Pippen is 10th all-time in NBA playoff games with 208, appearing in every postseason from 1988 through 2003, starting as a 22-year-old rookie with the Bulls and ending as a 37-year-old with the Portland Trail Blazers.

But his career was complicated by people not believing him — and not believing in him.

For all of his steadiness and versatility, twice in the playoffs he came up famously short, the migraine game in Game 7 of the 1990 Eastern Conference finals against the Pistons and his infamous moment in 1994, where he refused to re-enter the game with 1.8 seconds left in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals because Phil Jackson asked him to inbound the ball so Toni Kukoc could take the last shot.

“It was my first year playing without Michael Jordan, why wouldn’t I be taking that last shot?” Pippen told GQ. “I been through all the ups and downs, the battles with the Pistons and now you gonna insult me and tell me to take it out? I thought it was a pretty low blow.”

And you might be thinking, it’s 2021, who cares? Pippen came back to play well that series and then won three more rings with Jordan. His underwhelming contract was an albatross on him mentally, but he wound up making more money on the court than Jordan himself with his next big deal.

While Pippen played on playoff teams in Houston and Portland, he couldn’t make it back to the NBA Finals. Jordan’s two-season return in Washington was a flop in terms of what mattered most.

In the end, it was clear, and it’s obvious now, that Pippen needed Jordan, and Jordan needed Pippen.

“Whenever they speak of Michael Jordan,” Jordan said in “The Last Dance,” “they should speak Scottie Pippen.”

You can’t rewrite history. Jordan was Jordan, the best of all time, and Pippen was Pippen, a great player in his own right, and the hierarchy there is clear.

But there’s nothing wrong with being Scottie Pippen, Hall of Famer, six-time NBA champion and a true American success story.

Career stats: G: 1,178, Pts.: 16.1, Reb.: 6.4,Ast.: 5.2, FG%: 47.3, FT%: 70.4, Win Shares: 125.1, PER: 18.6

The AthleticNBA 75 Panel points: 644 | Hollinger GOAT Points: 127.7

Achievements: Seven-time All-NBA, Seven-time All-Star, NBA champ (’91, ’92, ’93, ’96, ’97, ’98), Steals champ (’95), Olympic gold (’92, ’96), Hall of Fame (’10), NBA at 50 (’96), NBA 75th Anniversary team (’21)

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)