Last Friday the Chicago Bulls held a halftime ceremony to unveil their Ring of Honor, a pantheon reserved for the organization’s greatest contributors, but many of them couldn’t make it. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen are feuding as a wedding between Michael’s eldest son and Pippen’s ex-wife draws near. Dennis Rodman was waylaid by 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 court with her children and grandchildren sprinkled among the crowd. She came dressed in black – a sign, maybe, that the loss of her husband is still fresh in her mind. In hindsight, she would have been better off staying home.
When Krause’s name was announced among the 13 inaugural inductees, a sizable number of the 21,000-odd spectators at the United Center booed him long and lustily as Thelma sat on front row center between the son of the late Hall of Fame coach Jerry Sloan (a star guard for the Bulls in the ’60s and ’70s) and longtime assistant coach Tex Winter, mastermind of the triangle offense. Ron Harper, the rugged point man for the second half of the Bulls’ ’90s run, consoled Thelma as she dissolved into tears and threw up her hands, as if crying uncle. “I was totally unprepared for the reaction,” she would say in a later statement to the TV news magazine Inside Edition. “I can’t call them fans because a fan would know better.”
Like a Doberman defense, the NBA community was quick to step in. Right out of the break, Stacey King, the three-time champion pivot who now provides color commentary for Bulls games, said the booing was “the worst thing I’ve ever 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 personal. “I’m devastated for Thelma and the Krause family,” he said after the game, a nine-point Bulls loss. “The fans who boo know who they are and, to me, it’s absolutely shameful.” Charles Barkley, not surprisingly, was the most heavy-handed. “Y’all 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 voice their displeasure. God knows they seize every chance. When they’re not heckling the home team for playing poorly, they’re jeering imperious commissioners, cheeky mascots, off-key anthem performances – you name it. Not even the LA Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford could avoid a rancorous reception when he returned to Ford Field for last Sunday’s NFC wildcard game against Detroit – the team where he spent his entire career as a hero before being traded to the Rams in 2021. We expect New York sports fans to flout their local authorities and Philadelphia sports fans to boo everyone and their mother and Santa Claus.
Chicago sports fans were thought to be a savvier group. Just a few weeks ago, around 62,000 fans at Chicago’s Soldier Field were chanting “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 mulling whether to deal the third-year player for draft picks, has since spawned campaign signs on the roads leading to the Bears’ suburban headquarters like “In Justin We Trustin.”
And yet: Bulls management should have known better than to serve Thelma Krause up to the nostalgic patrons who have kept the team among the league leaders in attendance through the decades. Bulls fans booed Jerry when he was alive. The bad feelings here run deep. They were stoked by a number of his fellow honorees. Short, stocky and thick with regional accent, Krause was the Rodney Dangerfield of NBA executives: the man who still gets no respect. When he was starting out in the 1960s and 70s, basketball people struggled with what to make of this scout with territories in basketball and baseball – unearthing 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. Seizing on the ever present donut residue on Krause’s lapels, Jordan nicknamed the GM “Crumbs” and, with Pippen, helped establish the popular narrative of Krause as a jock-sniffing wannabe who’d suffer any amount of public abuse in exchange for an all-access pass to the hottest show on earth. They made fun of his slept-in clothes and general frugalness. Phil Jackson, whom Krause plucked from the CBA, also slowly came to resent the GM as sportswriters attributed more of the team’s dizzying success to the team’s sideline Zen Master.
However, Krause didn’t truly become a public enemy until he vowed to blow up the Bulls near the end of their title run, as Jordan and co grew older and more expensive, and made good on that promise when Jackson retired after the team’s sixth and final championship. Krause did himself few favors tipping off that 1997-98 season by saying “players and coaches don’t win championships; organizations win championships”, arguing later that a key word – “players and coaches alone” – was dropped.
That set the stage for a massive conflict between the locker room and the front office that was chronicled painstakingly in the press at the time and, again, decades later in Netflix’s The Last Dance. The docuseries goes to even greater lengths to paint Krause as the villain – yielding considerable time to Jackson, Pippen and Jordan (an executive producer on the film) to re-air their many grievances against the man. Never mind that there’d be no rose-tinted recollections of that shared history without Krause.
No, he didn’t draft Jordan (former league disciplinarian Rod Thorn gets full credit for that.) But Krause did just about everything else: drafted Pippen, traded for Rodman, hit on short-stint signings such as Bison Dele and, most importantly, ignored just about all of Jordan’s personnel recommendations. Krause sustained a dynasty across a decade at a time when winning two titles in a row was regarded as a nigh-impossible feat. What’s more, Krause didn’t just usher 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 2003 motorcycle accident, who knows how far those young Bulls could have gone with Ron Artest, Jamal Crawford, Elton Brand and Jalen Rose in their corner, too.
In an era where team executives receive top billing alongside roster stars (the Sixers’ Daryl Morey, the Patriots’ Scott Pioli, the Cubs’ Theo Epstein), Krause really could have been a bigger jerk about his contributions in retrospect. That he kept working away and cared so much speaks volumes. So he blew up the Bulls. He was just following orders; that owner Jerry Reinsdorf has been able to elide responsibility for the Bulls breakup beggars belief given the team’s middling results since and that miserable baseball team of his on the South Side. Also: Jordan didn’t exactly prove to be a natural roster builder either.
No dynasty ends neatly, and Krause spared fans from experiencing the hoops misery that is the over-the-hill Warriors this season. The moves he made afterward shouldn’t negate all the building he did to make the Bulls into one of the NBA’s marquee franchises. In the end Krause earned the right to be honored by his team in absentia without his widow and surviving family suffering more abuse. But true fans know he deserved far better than that.
