The Last Dance: 3 main characters from week 1 of Michael Jordan doc

Jerry Krause

The Last Dance is basically all Jerry Krause’s fault.

The perfection of sports is often when team management and the product on the court are in perfect harmony. For many teams, this synchronicity only happens for a few seasons, and those seasons become the few years that the team has to compete for a title.

For the Bulls title team in 1998, they had anything but synchronicity with the front office.

Jerry Krause had made it clear to head coach Phil Jackson that this would be his last season in Chicago. He told Jackson he didn’t care if the team went 82-0. He wanted him gone that bad.

Krause was depicted as jealous of the recognition Jordan and Jackson got regarding the Bulls’ success. Krause wanted to be viewed as the mastermind that constructed the winning team and didn’t like the narrative that it was all Michael and Phil.

The team would enter a rebuild following 1998 regardless of how the season ended, and that directive from Krause implemented a ticking time clock for Jordan, Jackson, and the Bulls. If this was the last run, could they win it one last time?

Moreover, could they keep a winning culture amongst themselves even though management was not at all on the same page?

In many ways, it makes the 1998 Bulls season even more remarkable. The Bulls had a winning team, but Krause was actively trying to break it up. What NBA team could we see today win a title, a three-peat, no less, while the person pulling the strings was working against it?

Krause sits atop the story here as an unintentional villain, a suit that felt as though he knew the game better than the players.