CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — The Chicago Bulls will induct their 1996 championship team into their brand-new Ring of Honor this Friday. That season, the Bulls won a then-record 72 wins, and their first victim was the Hornets in a game lost to the ages.
Until now.
If you had to pick a game that best summed up the greatness of the 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls, it most likely wouldn’t be their first.
“We didn’t realize how good we could be or how things were going to break down after that,” said Bulls reserve center Bill Wennington.
Wennington played for the Bulls from 1993-99.
That’s because their season opener was, well, a bit odd. With the offseason acquisition of star defender Dennis Rodman, the Bulls started coming together as a team.
On the other hand, Charlotte, at that point on Nov. 3, 1995, was coming apart.
“We felt our bubble had burst a little bit in the locker room,” said guard Dell Curry, who played for Charlotte from 1988 to 1998.
The day of the game, all heck had broken loose for the Hornets. Earlier, the team sent center Alonzo Mourning to Miami in a multi-player deal. When tip time approached, Charlotte only had nine players suited up.
“I mean, we had a front line, Robert Parrish and George Zidek,” Curry remarked.
And yet, somehow, they, along with all-star forward Larry Johnson, were proving too much for the so-called team of the 90s in the beginning. The Bulls were without starting center Luc Longley (suspended for fighting Chris Webber in the preseason). Things looked even worse for Chicago when Scottie Pippen left the game for good in the second quarter with a groin injury.
“Scottie, if you go back and look at the numbers, Scottie played ten minutes,” Wennington said. “He couldn’t move.”
But Michael Jordan could. And on this night, his 42-point performance would be the difference as the Bulls rallied from a double-digit deficit to win 105-91.
It wasn’t pretty. Nor was it indicative that a historic run was underway. But in hindsight, there were signs.
“We had guys step up,” said Wennington, who scored six points in the Bulls’ win. “I think when you look back at that team, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Toni Kukoc were the drivers of that team. But everyone else understood what they had to do.”
The first of 72 and the first of three losses the Bulls would hand the Hornets that season, including one later in the year in which they’d open up the game with 20 unanswered.
“At that point, they knew they had something special,” Curry said. “And anytime they saw a team, they knew they should beat on paper, they were going to do that.”
Like Rome, the Bulls were not built in a day, but let the record show that the first brick was laid against the Hornets in one weird season opener.