Last Friday, the Chicago Bulls held a halftime ceremony to unveil their Ring of Honor, a pantheon reserved for the organization’s biggest contributors, but many of them couldn’t make it. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen argue as a wedding between Michael’s eldest son and Pippen’s ex-wife approaches. Dennis Rodman was besieged by the weather, he says. Jerry Krause, the architect of the team’s 1990s dynasty, died in 2017, leaving his 80-year-old wife, Thelma, to represent him on the field, while her children and grandchildren stood among the crowd. She came dressed in black – perhaps a sign that the loss of her husband is still fresh in her memory. In retrospect, she should have stayed home.
When Krause’s name was announced among the 13 inaugural inductees, a sizable number of the approximately 21,000 spectators at the United Center booed him long and lustfully as Thelma sat in the front row center among the son of the late Hall of Fame coach Jerry Sloan (a star guard for the Bulls in the 1960s and 1970s) and longtime assistant coach Tex Winter, the brains behind the triangle offense. Ron Harper, the rugged point man for the second half of the Bulls ’90s, comforted Thelma as she burst into tears and threw her hands in the air, as if crying uncle. “I was completely unprepared for the reaction,” she would later say in a statement to the TV news magazine Inside Edition. “I can’t call them fans, because a fan would know better.”
Related: Bulls fans boo Jerry Krause during Ring of Honor ceremony, leaving widow in tears
Like a Doberman defense, the NBA community quickly intervened. Immediately after the break, Stacey King, the three-time championship pivot who now provides color commentary for Bulls games, said the booing was “the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.” seen in my life.” Legendary Bulls sharpshooter Steve Kerr, who was in the locker room with his visiting Golden State Warriors during the halftime ceremony, took it personally. “I’m devastated for Thelma and the Krause family,” he said after the game, a nine-point loss to the Bulls. “The fans who boo know who they are and to me it’s absolutely shameful.” Not surprisingly, Charles Barkley was the most heavy-handed. “You made that lady cry,” he said on TNT. “And that was total BS.”
In case it’s unclear, no one is suggesting that fans shouldn’t exercise their right to express their displeasure. God knows they take every opportunity. When they’re not harassing the home team for playing poorly, they’re mocking imperious commissioners, sassy mascots, out-of-tune national anthem performances – you name it. Even LA Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford couldn’t avoid a rancorous reception when he returned to Ford Field for last Sunday’s NFC wild-card game against Detroit — the team where he spent his entire career as a hero before being traded to the Rams in 2021 . New York sports fans flouting their local authorities and Philadelphia sports fans cursing everyone and their mother And Santa Claus.
Chicago sports fans were thought to be a smarter group. Just a few weeks ago, some 62,000 fans at Chicago’s Soldier Field sang “We want Fields” as quarterback Justin Fields led the Bears to victory against the Falcons. The show of support, a direct message to team C-suiters currently pondering whether to deal the third-year player for draft picks, has since spawned campaign signs on the roads leading to the Bears’ suburban headquarters, such as “In Justin We Trustin’.
And yet: Bulls management should have known better than to serve Thelma Krause against the nostalgic patrons who have kept the team among the league leaders over the decades. Bulls fans booed Jerry when he was alive. The bad feelings here run deep. They were egged on by some of his fellow honorees. Short, stocky and fat, with a regional accent, Krause was the Rodney Dangerfield of NBA executives: the man who still gets no respect. When he started in the 1960s and 1970s, basketball people struggled with what to make of this scout with territories in basketball and baseball – turning up Kirk Gibson, Ozzie Guillen and other gems.
Few in the Bulls locker room took him seriously after the team promoted him to general manager before the 1985-86 season. Jordan took advantage of the ever-present donut residue on Krause’s lapel and nicknamed the GM “Crumbs.” Along with Pippen, he helped establish the popular narrative of Krause as a jock-sniffing wannabe who would be subjected to some form of public abuse in exchange for a full reward. -entrance pass to the most popular show in the world. They joked about his worn-in clothes and his general sobriety. Phil Jackson, whom Krause had plucked from the CBA, slowly came to resent the GM as well, as sportswriters attributed more of the team’s staggering success to the team’s Zen Master.
However, Krause only truly became a public enemy when he promised to blow up the Bulls near the end of their title run, as Jordan and co became older and more expensive, and made good on that promise when Jackson retired after the team’s sixth game. and final championship. Krause did himself few favors by wrapping up that 1997-98 season by saying, “Players and coaches don’t win championships; organizations win championships,” later arguing that a key word is “players and coaches.” only” – was deleted.
That set the stage for a massive conflict between the locker room and the front office, which was meticulously chronicled in the press at the time and again decades later in Netflix’s The Last Dance. The docuseries goes even further to portray Krause as the villain, giving Jackson, Pippen, and Jordan (an executive producer on the film) plenty of time to air their many grievances against the man again. It doesn’t matter that without Krause there would be no rosy memories of that shared history.
No, he didn’t draft Jordan (former league disciplinarian Rod Thorn gets all the credit for that.) But Krause did just about everything else: He drafted Pippen, traded for Rodman, scored short-term signings like Bison Dele and, most importantly, , ignored virtually all of Jordan’s personnel recommendations. Krause maintained a dynasty for ten years, while winning two titles in a row was considered a near-impossible feat. Moreover, Krause not only ushered in the era of the multinational NBA rotation – with centers from Australia (Luc Longley) and Canada (Bill Wennington), an Italian League MVP forward from Croatia (Toni Kukoč) and Kerr, born in Lebanon . – he was also early to retool around high schoolers Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler. If top draft pick Jay Williams didn’t lose his NBA career to a motorcycle accident in 2003, who knows how far those young Bulls could have gone with Ron Artest, Jamal Crawford, Elton Brand and Jalen Rose also in their corner.
In an era when team leaders receive top billing alongside top stars (Daryl Morey of the Sixers, Scott Pioli of the Patriots, Theo Epstein of the Cubs), Krause really could have been a bigger jerk about his contributions in retrospect. The fact that he continued to work and care so much speaks volumes. So he blew up the Bulls. He was just following orders; that owner Jerry Reinsdorf has managed to deflect responsibility for the Bulls’ collapse is going too far, considering the team’s mediocre results since then and that miserable baseball team of his on the South Side. Also: Jordan didn’t exactly appear to be a natural roster builder either.
No dynasty ends gracefully, and Krause has spared fans the misery of the over-the-hill Warriors this season. The moves he made after that shouldn’t undo what he did to make the Bulls one of the NBA’s biggest franchises. In the end, Krause earned the right to be honored in absentia by his team without further mistreatment of his widow and surviving relatives. But true fans know he deserved much better than that.