Here's some more Simmons Scottie love:
"Only Jordan was a better all-around player in the nineties … and that was debatable.1 From ’91 to ’95, Pippen averaged a 20–8–6 with 2.4 steals, shot 50 percent and doubled as the league’s top defensive player. In the playoffs from ’91 to ’98, he averaged 17–23 points, 7–9 boards and 4–7 assists every spring and consistently defended the other team’s best scorer. During MJ’s “sabbatical,” Scottie (20.8 PPG, 8.7 RPG, 5.6 APG, 49% FG) dragged the Bulls to within one fecally pungent call of the Eastern Finals 2 and should have been our ’94 MVP runner-up behind Hakeem. The following year, he became one of four postmerger players (along with Cowens in ’78, Kevin Garnett in ’03, and LeBron in ’09) to lead his team in total points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks in the same season. And he redefined the “point forward” concept during the nineties, allowing the Bulls to play any combination of guards without suffering in the ballhandling/defense departments. 3 Chuck Daly created a great term to describe Scottie: a “fill in the blanks” guy. If a teammate was getting killed defensively, Scottie had his back. If you needed rebounding, Scottie went down low and grabbed some boards. If you needed scoring, Scottie could create a shot or attack the rim. If you needed a turnover, Scottie had a better chance of getting it than anyone. If you needed ballhandling, he could do it. And if you needed to shut someone down, he did it. Like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction, Scottie specialized in cleaning up everyone else’s mess. When Magic was running amok in the ’91 Finals, Scottie put the clamps on him. When the Knicks were shoving an MJ-less Chicago team around in the ’94 playoffs, Scottie dunked on Ewing and stood over him defiantly. During the Charles Smith game the year before, Pippen and Horace Grant were the ones stuffing Smith and saving the series. When the ’98 Pacers nearly snuffed out the MJ era, Jordan and Pippen crashed the boards in Game 7 and willed themselves to the line again and again, two smaller guys dominating the paint against a bigger team. They just wanted it more."
Here's some more on Pippen from Simmons book including some Chuck Daly love:
"During the Dream Team practices, Daly called Scottie his second-best player and told David Halberstam, “You never really know how good a player is until you coach him, but Pippen was a great surprise in Barcelona—the confidence with which he played and the absolutely complete nature of his game, both on offense and defense. No one else really expected it.” According to Halberstam, MJ returned to Chicago after the Olympics and told Phil Jackson, “Scottie came in as just one of the other players, and none of the others knew how good he was, but then he kept playing, and by the end of the week it was clear that he was the top guard there—over Clyde and Magic and Stockton. It was great for people to see him in that setting and see how good he really was.” For those of you scoring at home, that’s sixteen combined rings paying homage."