Part 14

adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

Summary: In the previous thirteen chapters of this series, we recalled the history of the Rochester Royals’ transformation into the Houston Oilers and the Oilers’ subsequent successes and failures in their new home; the short but eventful lives lives of the IBL and the ABA as they tried to supplant the NBA as the dominant force in pro basketball; Houston’s back- to-back 1989 and 1990 NBA league titles; and their painful 1991 NBA Finals loss to the New York Knicks. In this chapter we’ll look back at the Oilers’ struggle to recapture the NBA league championship and how the inclusion of NBA players in the 1992 Olympic basketball tournament affected the Oilers’ 1993 NBA playoff run.

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The offseason following Houston’s ’91 NBA Finals loss to the New York Knicks was one filled with questions about whether the Oilers could bounce back from that defeat and return to the top of the NBA mountain. It was also a time when Michael Jordan the athlete was once and for all transformed into Michael Jordan the one-man Fortune 500 company; just two seasons removed from his first NBA league championship and seven years after being picked by Houston with their first selection in the 1984 NBA draft, he was being courted by just about every major business imaginable to do commercials on their behalf.

In fact, Air Jordan had become the King Midas of the NBA: everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. Just after the 1990 NBA Finals wrapped the global shoe giant Nike had introduced a new brand of signature high-top sneaker dubbed "the Jordan", and it had flown off the shelves within literally just minutes of being put on the market. And that was just the beginning of a tidal wave of Jordan-themed merchandise to flood department store aisles across the country: T-shirts, posters, action figures, athletic gear, stationery, computer games, posters, and even bath towels bearing Jordan’s face and signature were huge sellers in the 1990 December holiday shopping season.

The Oilers’ 1991 NBA Finals defeat by the Knicks did little to tarnish Jordan’s luster in the eyes of Madison Avenue-- or of his massive and steadily growing legion of fans. His popularity would even manage to cut across the battle lines of the Houston-Boston rivalry: when the Oilers arrived at Boston Garden for their first game against the Celtics of the ’91-’92 NBA regular season, there was a line outside about two blocks long of people waiting for a chance to get Jordan’s autograph or picture, and though the rest of Houston’s starting lineup drew a torrent of boos when they were introduced Jordan was greeted with massive applause from the Garden crowd.

At the time of the Boston game Houston was sporting a fairly respectable 7-3 record in its first ten games of the 1991-92 NBA regular season and came into the Garden looking to make it eight wins in eleven games. During the preseason they had individually and as a group decided to make one goal paramount over all of the rest-- erase the shame of their ’91 NBA Finals loss and recapture the O’Brien Trophy. As the reader can imagine, that goal would be a very powerful motivator indeed for the Oilers...

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....who left Boston with a 138-132 overtime win. After coming home for a few days’ rest, they jetted up to British Columbia for a rare neutral site contest in Surrey with the Seattle Mariners. The game was originally scheduled to be held at King County Arena but had to be moved because of a scheduling conflict with a rock concert booked before the ’91-’92 NBA regular season schedule had been announced.¹ Even if that scheduling conflict had never come up, however, it’s not entirely unreasonable to think that Jordan and company might have found themselves up in Canada sooner or later anyhow; part of the NBA’s efforts to expand its worldwide profile was a dedicated marketing campaign in that country whose main objectives were to encourage greater interest in the league among Canadians and promote the Vancouver and Toronto expansion franchises the league was hoping to add for its 1992-93 season.

It was around this same time that a group of French-Canadian investors got together in Montreal to begin preparing a bid to bring professional basketball back to the city. Montreal had been without a pro team since the ABA-NBA merger, and the investors’ group-- known in English as Quebec Hoops Limited --wanted to end that drought as soon as they could. The three options considered by the group were: (A)gain control of an existing NBA franchise and move it up to the Montreal area; (B)apply for an expansion franchise; (C)use their proposed team to act as one of the nuclei for a new league to compete with the NBA.

Out of these three choices, the second was considered by QH Limited’s primary backers to be the most realistic option they had for achieving their goals. None of the NBA’s existing clubs were up for sale at that time, and as for creating an alternative pro league....well, the last attempt at that hadn’t really gone too well, had it? So most of QH Limited’s energies were focused on positioning Montreal to land a new NBA team during the next round of expansion, which the group’s marketing research people estimated would most likely happen sometime around 2004.

Back in the States, the Kansas City-Omaha Monarchs were just about ready to call it quits on their fruitless efforts to get a new arena built for their franchise. The team’s ownership was of a mind to pull up stakes and relocate to a new city, and after a great deal of internal debate among team executives along with a healthy amount of schmoozing of civic and business leaders in at least two dozen potential new homes, the Monarchs brass had made up their minds to go with Sacramento, California as their club’s home city after the 1992-93 NBA season. While in the past such an announcement might have sparked an outcry among fans, relations between the Monarchs and the residents of the Kansas City-Omaha region were now so strained because of the drama over the team’s attempts to get a new arena built that the prevailing reaction in most quarters to the news was "Good riddance".

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The Oilers went into the 1991 Christmas holiday nine games over .500. Although the team had hit a few rough patches in late November and early December, the prevailing mood in the Houston locker room was an optimistic one; the Oilers were on a pace to win at least 61 games by the end of the regular season and they were a consensus pick among most national sportswriters to repeat as NBA Western Conference champions. Some media outlets were even picking the Oilers to regain the NBA league championship.

That optimistic mood was reinforced by back-to-back overtime wins against the Minneapolis Cyclones and the Philadelphia Flyers at Harris County Fieldhouse. Once again, Fitch’s team was showing a superb ability to perservere under even the hardest pressure-- an ability which would definitely come in handy at playoff time. But after the Oilers suffered a heartbreaking New Year’s Eve road loss against the Miami Marlins, some people began to have second thoughts. In that nail-biter, which Miami won on a three-pointer in the final seconds of regulation by Michigan alumnus Glen Rice, the Oilers seemed disoriented and distracted for a good portion of the second half; even Michael Jordan appeared to be having an off night against the Marlins, missing at least two critical free throws in the third quarter that might have put the game well out of reach for the Marlins.

Bill Fitch’s team began 1992 on a sour note; in their first game back in action after taking New Year’s Day off, the Oilers got their clocks cleaned by the Atlanta Knights in a defeat so embarrassing that the franchise’s own official fan magazine would call their on-court performance "a total travesty".² Many of the Oilers’ players were inclined to agree(albeit a bit reluctantly)with that assessment. One particularly harsh internal critic of Houston’s execution-- or lack thereof --on offense was Michael Jordan, who in his post-game comments to the media described his team’s scoring percentages against Atlanta as "atrocious".³

A repeat performance of that fiasco couldn’t be tolerated, not if the Oilers wanted to accomplish their goal of reclaiming the O’Brien Trophy. Stung by the manhandling they’d received in the New Year’s week debacle, Houston went on a rampage in their next ten games, compiling a 9-1 record during that stretch and beating their opponents by an average margin of 25 points. One particularly sweet victory for the Oilers in that span came in a rematch with the Knights at Harris County Fieldhouse two weeks after the New Year’s fiasco; avenging their previous humiliation at the Knights’ hands, they inflicted on Atlanta its worst loss of the ’91-’92 NBA season, clobbering the Knights 126-97.

For the remainder of the ’91-’92 season Houston compiled a .710 winning percentage; they finished the regular season in second place in the NBA Midwest Division. But that was hardly enough to satisfy Fitch or his players, who were determined by hook or by crook to regain the league championship. They headed into the first round of the 1992 NBA Western Conference playoffs with a laser-like focus....

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....a focus that helped them sweep the Phoenix Suns in highly convincing fashion to set up a second-round clash with the Dallas Mavericks, who were then starting what would turn out to be a run of four consecutive NBA Western Conference postseason appearances in the mid-‘90s.⁴ Like two gunslingers staring each other down in a dusty street in the cowboy movies so beloved by Texans, Houston and Dallas had their weapons at the ready and each was daring the other to draw.

It would be the Mavericks who fired the first shot, coming back from a twelve-point fourth quarter deficit to win the series opener 117-109. The Oilers evened things up with a 122-99 pasting of the Mavs in Game 2, then took the series lead with a 106-101 nailbiter victory in Game 3; Houston went into Game 4 hoping they could push Dallas to the brink of elimination with a victory on the road.

Instead, Game 4 turned out to be the point at which the series was tied once again and its momentum shifted in favor of Dallas for good. The Mavericks overcame injuries to two of their key defensive players and a twelve-point deficit with 3:41 left in the fourth quarter to beat the Oilers 101-97; their confidence boosted by this victory, Dallas trounced Houston 122-106 in Game 5 and eliminated the Oilers from the playoffs with a 98-93 win at Harris County Fieldhouse in Game 6. The early exit was a major shock for Oiler fans, who had expected Houston to dominate Dallas and then win the Western Conference finals to secure a possible NBA Finals rematch with the New York Knicks.⁵

It was the first time since 1987 that Houston had failed to reach the Western Conference finals; somebody had take the fall for it, and that somebody turned out to be Bill Fitch, who was fired in May of 1992 after nearly a decade as Oilers head coach. Oilers GM Bobby Wanzer subsequently designated former Providence College men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino to step in as Fitch’s successor; Pitino’s hiring was greeted with disbelief-- and in a few cases outrage --by Oilers fans who had been petitioning the team to hire Jerry Lucas or Oscar Robertson for the job.⁶

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As Pitino was assuming the mantle of the Oilers head coaching job, Michael Jordan and three of his teammates were about to make global sports history. The International Olympic Committee, after decades of resistance, had finally agreed to permit professional basketball players to take part in the Olympic men’s basketball tournament starting with the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. This meant that a number of countries-- including eventual gold medal winners the United States-- would be fielding teams with lineups comprised entirely of pros.

While much of the roster for Team USA would take weeks to be settled, the choice of Jordan was a no-brainer. With close to 16 years’ pro experience under his belt and a competitive fire which few other players could match, Air Jordan strengthened Team USA on defense and gave its offense an extra scoring punch that would come in handing when it faced opponents like Argentina, who had derailed U.S. medal hopes at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, and Lithuania, who was competing at the Olympics as an independent nation for the first time in decades and carving out a reputation as a bona fide medal contender despite its relatively short time in action as a team. The U.S. men’s squad, a formidable unit even without Jordan on its roster, became the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of the Olympic tournament once he signed on; Team USA finished its run in Barcelona with an undefeated record and its first Olympic gold medal since the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

For Jordan and the three Oilers teammates who’d accompanied him to Spain, the Barcelona Olympic experience turned out to be just what they needed to reinvigorate themselves going into the ’92-’93 NBA season. Jordan in particular felt his passion for the game, which had flagged a bit after Houston’s second round loss to the Mavericks, reviving with a vengeance and the extra workout time he’d put in sharpened his game to an extra-fine degree; last but not least, since he’d spent most of his summer abroad he’d been spared the distraction of the drama that had surrounded Rick Pitino’s introduction as head coach, which meant he could focus all his mental energies on getting ready for the NBA season. 

The Oilers started their 1992-93 NBA season with a 9-1 surge that saw them blow out the Kansas City-Omaha Kings 128-103 in Houston’s last-ever regular season visit to Kemper Arena and pull off one of their greatest comebacks in franchise history as they rallied from a thirteen-point deficit in the final seconds of the fourth quarter to post a spectacular overtime victory against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. By the time the regular season reached the quarter mark, Houston had already staked out a huge lead in the NBA Midwest Division and was averaging at least 102 points per game.

At the halfway mark of the season the Oilers were just a cat’s whisker behind the pace they’d set during the 1982-83 season when they won a franchise-record 66 games; by Easter Sunday they had effectively clinched the Midwest Division title and the #1 seed in the 1993 NBA Western Conference playoffs. Houston would finish the ’92-’93 regular season with 61 wins and a mission to get rid of the remaining bad karma from their unceremonious second-round ouster the previous year.

They succeeded in that mission and then some-- the Oilers cruised through the Western Conference playoffs to win their sixth Western Conference title under Bill Fitch and their first NBA Finals appearance since 1991. One especially satisfying series triumph for Houston during the ’93 postseason was a five- game annihilation of the Dallas Mavericks in the second round; the Oilers relished giving Dallas a taste of its own medicine. Another sweet moment for Rick Pitino’s squad was their seven- game vanquishing of the Seattle Mariners in the 1993 NBA Western Conference finals; the Mariners had swept the first two games of that series at Harris County Fieldhouse and in the early minutes of Game 3 had threatened to seize the advantage for keeps before guard Kenny Smith turned things around with a three-pointer just before halftime.

In the 1993 NBA Finals the Oilers would take on the Chicago Bulls, now an Eastern Conference franchise and making their first NBA Finals appearance in team history. The Bulls had home court advantage that year, but were unable to make as much use of that edge as they’d hoped; after a convincing victory over Houston at Harris County Fieldhouse in Game 1 they blew a twenty-point third quarter lead in Game 2 and ended up losing that contest 127-113, then wound up on the wrong end of a 144-108 blowout in Game 3 at Chicago Stadium. The Bulls managed to show a brief spark of life in Game 4 and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat when Chicago forward Scottie Pippen hit a layup to break a 98-98 deadlock in the closing seconds of regulation, but that was the last gasp of a franchise that was clearly outmatched.

The beginning of the end for Chicago came late in the second quarter of Game 5, when center Horace Grant was ejected after he disputed a technical foul that had been called against him while the Bulls were trying to stop an Oilers breakaway. Grant had been a critical component of Chicago’s offensive arsenal; with him out of the picture, the Bulls were dead in the water. Houston rolled to a 136-109 win and returned to Harris County Fieldhouse with a 3 games-to-2 series lead in hand.

The Oilers officially clinched their sixth NBA league title in team history with a 122-119 overtime victory over the Bulls in Game 6. Not surprisingly Michael Jordan, who’d been such a major part of Houston’s Finals triumphs in 1989 and 1990 and their 1991 Finals battle with the New York Knicks, was named the 1993 Finals MVP. And speaking of the Knickerbockers, one year from the day of Houston’s recapturing of the Larry O’Brien trophy they would have a golden opportunity to avenge their ’91 NBA Finals loss at New York’s hands....