The Chicago Bulls have dominated the NBA news cycle since the season went on hiatus, thanks to The Last Dance and their decision to use the off time to remake their entire front office, ousting longtime duo John Paxson and Gar Forman, hiring Arturas Karnisovas from Denver as their executive vice president of basketball operations.

Karnisovas swiftly began retooling the front office in Chicago, and the last big hire left to make was at general manager. Late Sunday night, they apparently got a deal done to bring in a new GM, as ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski brought word that Sixers assistant Marc Eversley has accepted the position.

Not only is it big news in that the Bulls have finalized a new front office structure, but it’s also historic for the franchise as Eversley is the first black general manager the Bulls have had.

When the Bulls list of candidates for their EVP position was reported, one of the chief criticisms was the lack of diversity in the pool, and it’s good to see Karnisovas and Reinsdorf take seriously the importance of looking into minority candidates for their GM position. In the end, they landed on Eversley as their man, who has worked previously in Philly, Toronto, and with Nike. It will now be on Eversley and Karnisovas to work together to figure out the next steps for the franchise, from what players to keep and build around to whether Jim Boylen should be the coach.

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The third and fourth episodes of The Last Dance look at a few pivotal turning points for Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls that help them begin their dynasty.

One is the firing of Doug Collins to make Phil Jackson head coach, bringing the triangle offense to Chicago, which Jordan wasn’t a fan of at the time. Another is the addition of former rival, Dennis Rodman, to the team for the second three-peat. Rodman entered the league with the Detroit Pistons and became a cornerstone of the Bad Boys era in which they won two titles and became the ultimate thorn in the Bulls side.

Jordan still hates most of the Pistons players from those teams, aside from Rodman, but no one is more reviled by Jordan and other Bulls players from the early 90s quite like Isiah Thomas. It was Jordan and Pippen that famously kept Thomas from being a part of the 1992 Dream Team roster, and their distaste for their former rival is still obvious to this day. A chief reason for this is how the Pistons chose to leave the floor in Game 4 of the 1991 conference finals as the Bulls were blowing them out.

Thomas led the way as the Pistons walked past the Bulls bench and off the floor without shaking their hands, with over seven seconds remaining on the clock. In The Last Dance, Thomas explains that they were just doing what the Celtics did to them in the late 80s when the Pistons finally knocked off Boston.

Jordan is handed a tablet to watch Thomas’ explanation, but before he prefaces it with a hilarious level of disdain for Thomas, noting nothing will keep him from still believing he was “an asshole.”

“Well I know it’s all bullsh*t,” Jordan says as they pass him the tablet. “Whatever he says now, you know it wasn’t his true actions then. You know, there’s time enough to think about it or the reaction of the public has changed his perspective. You can show me anything you want, it’s no way you can convince me he wasn’t an asshole.”

They then roll the clip of Thomas explaining what happened, which gets some incredible facial expressions from Jordan along the way.

“Nah. Adrian Dantley was shooting a free throw, and the Boston Celtics were walking off during the game, and I grabbed McHale, and then he stopped as he was walking off the floor. That’s how they left the floor. And to us, that was OK. Knowing what we know now and the aftermath of what took place, I think all of us would stop and say, ‘Hey, congratulations’ like they do now. … We would’ve did it, of course we would’ve done it. But during that period of time that’s just not how it was passed. You lost, you left the floor.”

Jordan’s “I told you so” face after Isiah says, “Knowing what we know now,” is one of the funniest moments of the first four episodes of the documentary. It’s clear the animosity between all parties — or, at least, Jordan towards Thomas and the Pistons — has not faded all that much with time, despite it being nearly 30 years since they played against each other.

The Bad Boys-era Detroit Pistons were the greatest foe the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls ever faced. Detroit took Chicago down in the NBA playoffs three years in a row early in Jordan’s career, resorting to hyper-aggressive tactics known as the “Jordan Rules” to physically and mentally test the Bulls and their superstar guard.

For years, this worked out swimmingly. Detroit beat Chicago in the conference semifinals in 1988, then bounced the Bulls in thee 1988 and 1989 conference finals. As we saw in episode four of The Last Dance, though, that did not happen in 1990 — Chicago’s front office replaced head coach Doug Collins with assistant coach Phil Jackson, who changed up how the team played and stressed becoming a mentally tougher squad.

“With them being more mentally dominant than we were, they knew, soon as we start complaining, they had us,” Bulls forward Horace Grant said. “And they did.”

That, combined with the commitment the Bulls’ players made to becoming physically stronger, worked. Chicago swept Detroit in the conference finals en route to winning their first ring in 1991, capping things off with a 21-point beatdown in the Motor City.

One moment in that Game 4 win stood out for all of those involved, as it was the moment that both teams realized the Pistons could no longer bully the Bulls. Scottie Pippen drove to the rim and received a shove from Dennis Rodman, the type of dirty play that had set the team off in past years. But instead of complaining or trying to retaliate, Pippen sat on the ground with a blank look on his face for a moment.

“When Pippen didn’t respond to that abuse, there’s nothing they could do to beat us then,” Jordan said.

This sentiment was shared by Detroit Pistons forward/center John Salley, who said that “Scottie was unshakeable, didn’t even want a band aid. When we saw that, it was over.”

Pippen’s lack of a response also galvanized the Bulls. Both Grant and Bill Cartwright looked back on the moment fondly, as both guys recalled the team’s mindset as Pippen got up and calmly stepped to the free throw line following the flagrant fouls.

“It was just like, ‘Ok, it’s a foul, let’s go ahead and finish kicking their ass,’” Grant said.

“And put ‘em out of their misery,” Cartwright said.

Chicago managed to do just that. Following this loss, Detroit’s tenure atop the Eastern Conference came to an end. The franchise got bounced in the first round of the playoffs the following year, then spent the next nine years either missing the playoffs or failing to get out of the first round.

Episodes three and four of The Last Dance highlighted our final two major characters in the story of the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls: Dennis Rodman and Phil Jackson.

The rise of Phil Jackson is fascinating, as he goes from a two-time NBA champion as a member of the Knicks to a coach in Puerto Rico to a coach in the CBA before Jerry Krause brings him to the Bulls to be part of Doug Collins’ coaching staff. How Jackson went from assistant to head coach in two years as a member of the Bulls staff is, essentially, as simple as him being willing to buy in to Tex Winter’s teachings of the triangle offense — which Jerry Krause believed was the best offensive system — and Collins pushing Winter to the periphery to run an isolation-centric offense where the main goal was to feed Michael Jordan.

As Scottie Pippen put it, “Doug’s approach was more catered to Michael, and Phil’s approach was more catered to the team.”

That philosophy endeared him to Jordan, but ultimately led Krause to want to make a coaching change after the 1989 season, despite the Bulls having just made a run to the conference finals. Collins, who Jordan loved because he was the focal point, was replaced by Jackson, and in episode four of The Last Dance, Jordan explained that he was not keen on the coaching change and was anti-triangle when it was first introduced to him.

“I wasn’t a Phil Jackson fan when he first came in, because he was coming in to take the ball out of my hands. Doug put the ball in my hands,” Jordan said. “Everybody has the opportunity to touch the ball, but I didn’t want Bill Cartwright to have the ball with five seconds left. That’s not an equal opportunity offense, that’s f*cking bullsh*t.”

Jordan then goes on to discuss how Winter would constantly beg him to pass the ball, leading him to bark back a classic Jordan line.

“There were so many times Tex would yell at me ‘move the ball, move the ball.’ ‘There’s no I in team,’ I said, ‘there’s an I in Win.’”

It’s a nearly identical story to one Shaq told about Kobe Bryant during his memorial service, about Bryant responding to the “there’s no I in team” line with “yeah, but there’s an m-e in that motherf*cker.”

Episode 4 explores how Phil eventually got Jordan to understand the reasoning behind the philosophy, pointing to the Pistons and the Jordan Rules as to why having the ball in his hands all the time made them predictable and easy to game plan for in a playoff series. That change in Jordan’s attitude towards being more willing to try and make his teammates better — albeit, often in the manner of berating them — is what most in the documentary point to as the difference in them winning the ’91 title.

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This week, Dennis Rodman takes center stage in The Last Dance, as episodes three and four explore the Bulls-Pistons rivalry of the late 80s and early 90s — years Rodman spent in Detroit — and how he ended up joining the Bulls for their second three-peat.

One of the central themes of the two episodes is how Rodman was always seeking acceptance and how he found that on the Bulls. He was respected and appreciated by Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen for the dirty work he did on the court, and he found a coach in Phil Jackson that truly understood his personality, along with the fact that he had very different needs from his teammates .

The most famous example of this was a midseason vacation Jackson granted to Rodman to go to Las Vegas for 48 hours and blow off some steam after Pippen had returned to the lineup. Jordan warned Phil against such a decision, explaining that there was no chance Rodman would return on time, but Jackson gave Rodman the go ahead to hit Las Vegas.

The end of episode three and beginning of episode four tell the story of that trip, with Rodman’s then-girlfriend Carmen Electra providing key eye-witness account of that trip and how it ended. Jordan is asked at the top of E4 if Rodman returned on time, and responds with this statement.

“Mmm-mmm. He didn’t come back on time,” Jordan said. “We had to go get his ass out of bed. And I’m not going to say what’s in his bed, where he was, blah blah blah.”

It’s a bit disappointing that all these years later Jordan won’t spill a little tea on what exactly went down, but luckily Carmen Electra was willing to fill in a little bit on how it went down in Las Vegas when Jordan came to drag Rodman out of bed.

“There’s a knock on the door. It’s Michael Jordan, and, I hid,” Carmen Electra said. “I just, I don’t want him to see me like that. I’m hiding behind the couch with covers over me. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get to practice.’”

I’m sure there was far more colorful language involved, but it is a very funny visual to imagine Jordan flying to Vegas, surely stopping at a blackjack table somewhere between the lobby and Dennis’ hotel room, finding Dennis’ room, and beating down the door until Rodman came back to Chicago with him, all while Carmen Electra hides behind a couch.

If there’s one critique of The Last Dance it’s that the participants still aren’t quite as willing to really get into the weeds on certain stories 30 years later, but, to be clear, it’s still been a phenomenal watch and hearing these stories, even ones we’ve heard or read before, from the people involved has been tremendous to watch.

While The Last Dance is nominally about the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, it also traces the history of its greatest players and the team during the Michael Jordan era.

In Episode 3, the focus is on the rivalry the Bulls had with the Bad Boys Pistons, but before they could face the Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals in 1989 they had to get by a very good Cleveland Cavaliers team. In Game 5 of that series, Jordan and Craig Ehlo traded shots to take the lead on the final three possessions, with Jordan hitting the game-winner in what would become known as “The Shot.”

Jordan and then Cavalier and future Bull Ron Harper discussed what they were thinking going into that final play, with both still rather stunned that Cavs coach Lenny Wilkens put Ehlo on Jordan for the final possession.

“They had Craig Ehlo on me at the time, which, in all honesty, was a mistake, because the guy that played me better was Ron Harper,” Jordan said.

Harper was a bit more salty about it.

“We up by one, I said, ‘Coach, I got MJ, I got MJ,’” Harper said. “So the coach tells me, ‘I’ma put Ehlo on MJ,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, ok, whatever, f*ck this bullsh*t.’”

Of course, Jordan hit the shot from the free throw line at the buzzer, a moment that launched his reputation as the most clutch player in the NBA. Now, there are plenty that will point out that Ehlo played perfectly fine defense and there’s no way to know if Harper would’ve played him better or kept him from hitting a tough game-winner, but Harper for sure wishes he knew.

If time heals all wounds, then Michael Jordan needs a little bit more to get past his feelings on the Detroit Pistons squad that served as a thorn in his side for years. Episodes three and four of The Last Dance spend a bunch of time on Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ quest for a first championship, and as such, a ton of time is spent on the Bad Boys-era Detroit Pistons, which relished the chance to bully Jordan’s teams physically and mentally.

“We knew how important to the NBA it was to get Michael to go to the next level,” former Pistons big man John Salley said during the doc. “The blueprint was Larry [Bird], Magic [Johnson], now Michael. And all of a sudden, there was this little team in Detroit who just messed up the whole story. We loved that.”

“We knew Michael Jordan was the greatest player, and we tried to use it as a rallying cry to come together,” Isiah Thomas said. “We had to do everything from a physicality standpoint to stop him.”

Naturally, a main focus in all of this were the legendary Jordan Rules. Salley and Thomas gave the most basic definition: Detroit tried its hardest to keep Jordan on the ground, with Thomas saying that “when he was in the air, we had no shot.” Former Pistons assistant Brendan Malone dove in a little deeper.

“This is what the Jordan Rules were,” Malone said. “On the wings, we’re going to push him to the elbow and we’re not gonna let him drive to the baseline. Number two, when he’s on top, we’re gonna influence him to his left. When he got the ball in the low post, we’re gonna trap him from the top. That’s the Jordan Rules, and it was that simple.”

Of course, there were times when Jordan was going to beat these rules, because he was simply that good. Malone was asked what happened when Jordan was able to drive baseline, which for Jordan usually meant he was going to score.

“That’s when [Bill] Laimbeer and [Rick] Mahorn would go up and knock him down to the ground,” Malone said.

“I compare Michael Jordan to nobody, because for him to survive that and still maintain that greatness, it’s unparalleled,” then-Pistons enforcer Dennis Rodman said.

Jordan still had his big games, but for years, they were never enough to get past Detroit. Chicago fell to the Pistons in the 1988 Eastern Conference Semifinals, then lost to them in the conference finals each of the next two years. The team eventually cleared the hurdle in 1991, sweeping Detroit in the conference finals en route to their first championship.

Still, everything that occurred between the two sides still sits poorly with Jordan, who gave an incredibly Michael Jordan response to a question about the Bad Boys.

“Oh, I hated them,” Jordan said. “That hate carries even to this day. They made it personal, they physically beat the sh*t out of us.”

Viewing parties have become a big deal on Twitter since quarantining became a thing, and it was only a matter of time until one was thrown for the fifth highest grossing film in screen history (not adjusted for inflation, of course): Avengers: Infinity War. Sunday saw the one-year anniversary of Avengers: Endgame, and ComicBook.com celebrated by throwing its predecessor an online party. Joining them were screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and one of the tidbits they shared was that Captain America almost had a very different arc.

To be exact, he was almost not in it till the third act. One fan asked them about a rumor to that effect, to which the two, sharing the same Twitter account, replied, “Yep. Then we came to our senses.”

They didn’t expand upon that, but it’s hard to imagine an Infinity War that was short on Cap. Did they change that in part because actor Chris Evans wanted to part ways with his most iconic screen character, and they wanted to give him sufficient screentime so his Endgame arc would hit harder? Who knows! Perhaps they’ll elaborate at another juncture. After all, we have plenty of time to talk about Marvel movies, and other films as well.

(Via ComicBook.com)