Hall of Fame Chicago Bulls power forward Toni Kukoc, who won three straight champions with the team from 1996-98, revealed in a new conversation with Brandon "Scoop B" Robinson that he wishes his former Chicago comrade Michael Jordan had teamed up with a then-Eastern Conference rival to create a supergroup, more along the lines of the modern team-building NBA era.
Kukoc believes a club fielding Jordan and Orlando Magic-turned-Los Angeles Lakers center Shaquille O'Neal would be virtually unbeatable, so he told Robinson.
“Best lineup ever assembled. It wouldn’t even matter who brings the ball up. There’s so much firepower there that I don’t think that there would be ANY team that would compete with them,” Kukoc said. “Wouldn’t be fair.”
O'Neal and Jordan faced off against each other twice in the NBA postseason. With a little help from former Bulls champ (and future Lakers champ) Horace Grant, the Big Diesel actually vanquished Jordan, Kukoc, and Scottie Pippen in the second round of the 1995 Eastern Conference Playoffs, during a hard-fought six-game series. Jordan had just returned from his baseball sabbatical midseason, and wasn't quite in basketball shape just yet. With Dennis Rodman freshly in tow, the 72-win Bulls (then a regular season record) ran through Shaq's 60-win Magic team during the 1996 Eastern Conference Finals in a sweep.
That would be the last four games O'Neal would ever play for Orlando, as he inked a lucrative new contract with Los Angeles that summer. After MJ's Bulls-era head coach Phil Jackson signed on with the Lakers in 1999, O'Neal immediately won three straight titles of his own. Imagining the two all-time greats together around their apex, in the mid-to-late 1990s (Jordan was old but still a perennial MVP candidate through his second Bulls retirement), is pretty darn tantalizing. Neither was much of an outside shooter, but that element of the game wasn't nearly as important as it is today.
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