Back in the old days of the NBA, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls were viewed as rivals with just about everybody. But in 1990, they had yet to win a championship. So the Bulls were looking for a player to help put Jordan over the top.
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Some members of the organization felt that maybe it could be no less than Danny Ainge, once a member of Larry Bird's Boston Celtics dynasty. At the time, though, he was starring for the Sacramento Kings.
And some members of the Bulls organization were hoping the team would pursue Ainge to pair with Jordan when Ainge became available after the 1989-90 season, pe NBA insider Sam Smith's book The Jordan Rules.
Ainge, now the CEO of the Utah Jazz, always had leadership skills, it seems.
"He'll tell Michael to (expletive) off when he starts calling for the ball," former Bulls assistant coach Johnny Bach said of Ainge at the time. "And sometimes we need that."
Ainge and Jordan always had a bond, as the two golfed together the day before Jordan's 63-point playoff eruption vs. Ainge's Celtics in the 1986 first round. (The Celtics won that Game 2 and swept the series, by the way, on their way to the NBA championship.)
After leaving the sides of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson with the Celtics, Ainge became the team leader and top scorer with the Kings.
But those Kings were pretty bad and both parties were looking to move on.
Ainge was a relentless player who refused to back down and could bury shots from just about anywhere. He was feisty. He played both guard spots, had size at 6-foot-5 and sometimes led the NBA in free-throw percentage. All that after his pro sports career started as a baseball player in the Toronto Blue Jays organization.
Anyway, Jordan reportedly respected Ainge the player.
The same could not be said of some of Jordan's teammates. That included fellow Bulls guard Steve Colter.
"Colter wasn't strong enough to stand up to Jordan," Smith wrote. "... The Bulls were looking for a scorer for their second team, but they also needed someone to stand up to Jordan when he routinely ordered his teammates out of the way late in games."
That man could have been Ainge, but a trade never happened.
Instead, the Kings sent him to the Portland Trail Blazers (for Byron Irvin and draft picks) and Jordan instead went on to pair with the likes of John Paxson, Craig Hodges, B.J. Armstrong, Steve Kerr and others in the Bulls' backcourt.
But it still all worked out OK, as was documented in The Last Dance documentary on Netflix. Jordan and the Bulls still went on to win six NBA titles, and Ainge went on to make two more Finals appearances — one each with the 1992 Blazers and '93 Phoenix Suns. Both times, Ainge's team lost to Jordan and the Bulls.
So hey, maybe Ainge, too, wishes the Bulls had tried harder to trade for him.
