Michael jordan im back chicago tribune11/29/2023 The contract did have a rare early termination option after Year 1, allowing Kukoc and the Bulls to rip up the long-term pact after the 1993-94 season and sign a new contract with a larger salary. The Bulls had limited salary-cap flexibility, so the first-year salary started at $1.1 million, the most they could offer. Three months before Jordan retired, Chicago signed Kukoc to an eight-year, $18.1 million contract. He was also named MVP of the EuroLeague final four in 1990, 19, and earned two silver medals in the Olympics - in 1988 with Yugoslavia and 1992 with Croatia. In that three-year period, Kukoc won two EuroLeague titles with KK Jugoplastika and an Italian cup with Benetton. Kukoc remained in Europe for three seasons, playing for KK Jugoplastika and Benetton Treviso. 2 pick of the second round of the 1990 draft. The details: Kukoc was 21 when Chicago selected him with the No. Pippen's deal allowed the Bulls to build up the rest of the roster, but the ill will it engendered - and the fact that Reinsdorf wouldn't renegotiate - still lingers in the relationship between the Hall of Famer and his former team. He requested a trade in '95, but Reinsdorf wouldn't budge. For Pippen, though, it turned out to be a major source of frustration. "I could have played with Shawn, but I wouldn't have been as comfortable as I was with Scottie."įor the Bulls, the Sonics backing out at the last minute was the best thing that could have happened. Adande asked Jordan if he would have come back to play basketball in '95 if Pippen hadn't been on the team. What has gotten lost at times over the years is that the Bulls almost sent Pippen to the Seattle SuperSonics in 1994 in exchange for Shawn Kemp, a deal that never quite made it to the finish line. Sometimes I make good deals and sometimes I make bad deals." "His answer was, 'You'll never hear from me.' I told him I didn't believe it, but he promised that would be the case. "I told him when he was getting ready to sign this deal that 'halfway through it you're going to think you're underpaid, especially since we front-loaded it,'" Reinsdorf told Sam Smith, then of The Chicago Tribune. The significance: As longtime Bulls observers remember, Reinsdorf was the one who told Pippen not to sign the deal. Pippen would end 1997-98 as the sixth-highest-paid player on the Bulls. The total value of the remaining five seasons (through 1997-98) was $13.3 million. Pippen's base salary in the current season (1990-91) and remaining two years increased significantly, with the final two years averaging out to $3 million per season. The contract was eventually renegotiated and extended for a total of $18 million after the Bulls won their first championship in 1991. The details: Two months after he was selected in the first round of the 1987 draft, Pippen signed a six-year, $5 million contract. In 1999, the NBA put a maximum on what players could earn based on years of service, and the max salary slot for MJ would have been $14 million. Jordan's monumental deal not only set the bar for the time, it set the path for the max contracts that would come after Jordan eventually retired. As author Roland Lazenby noted in "Mindgames: Phil Jackson's Long Strange Journey," it was a comment that stuck with Jordan long after he signed the deal. It was the fact that Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf famously told Jordan that he would regret giving the guard such a big contract. The significance: The greatest player in the game signed the biggest contract in the NBA, but the noteworthy part of the deal wasn't just the money. Jordan's $33.1 million salary was the largest in NBA history at the time, over $10 million more than the second-highest of the 1997-98 season, Patrick Ewing's $20.5 million deal.
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