Close encounters don't worry Bulls

Bulls squeak past Sonics in OT

Stats Class: Is this the best run ever?

Lawrence: Remarkable reign

As in, "We were close enough to beat the Bulls," which is how the Seattle SuperSonics comforted themselves limping out of Chicago late Tuesday night after losing 89-87 in overtime.

Some suggest the gap between Michael Jordan's Bulls and the rest of the league is starting to narrow.

"We took what we had to out of this game," coach George Karl said. "We thought we could win it, but we did take away the belief that we can beat them."

Now Karl knows that as a rallying cry, "We believe we can beat them," is not A-level material. It's not the kind of thing you lay on an audience full of CEOs on one of those motivational-speaking tours. And as far as using it when the huddle breaks, forget it. Karl tried that last year during the NBA Finals and got pummeled four games to two.

Even with Dickie V. screaming, "We believe we can beat them" it just doesn't get the adrenalin flowing quite the same way as being able to say, "We ripped their eyeballs out once, we can do it again!"

But it's better than nothing. Which until very recently was the most any sane person would wager against Chicago repeating as league champions.

Only last week, the cover of Sports Illustrated carried a cartoon showing Michael Jordan inspecting his fingernails for lack of anything more challenging to do. The headline spoke for itself: "Are the Bulls So Good They're Bad for the NBA?"

Now it appears there is something to that SI cover curse, after all. Because suddenly there's hope the Bulls might be too old, too slow, too thin, too tired, too edgy or too dependent on fortune's easy smile to defend their title by the time June rolls around.

In the past two weeks, they've lost at New York and New Jersey and had surprising trouble putting away some of the league's lesser lights. They might have lost again Tuesday night, too, without unlikely heroics from Luc Longley and Steve Kerr and -- the Sonics believed -- very generous treatment from the refs.

Here's how the deciding moments of the game unfolded: With 16 seconds left in overtime, Jordan was called for a foul. After Gary Payton missed the second of two free throws with the score tied 87-87 and 16 seconds left in overtime, Chicago rebounded and ran the clock down to 0:03. Then Jordan, fronted by Payton, lost control of the ball rising up for a jump shot, and fired a line drive off the glass that never had a chance. This time, Payton was whistled for the foul. Jordan made both free throws -- the last of six he was awarded in OT -- and the game was over.

"He lost the ball and I didn't foul anybody," Payton, the NBA's reigning defensive player of the year, maintained afterward.

Karl said he wouldn't talk about the end of the game, then proceeded to do exactly that.

"Everybody in the world knows there's a double standard here," he said. "But that's part of it. You got to win a championship. It's the old cliche of knocking out the world champion in boxing."

So it is, and Jordan, while dismissing as "garbage" the broader claim that Chicago got most of the calls, conceded, "If we're in Seattle, maybe I don't get that one."

But that, Jordan added, was precisely the point of the exercise. The point of the regular season, in fact. For enduring the grind better than anybody, the Bulls are going to enjoy the homecourt advantage they might need to decide the Finals against Seattle, or anybody else, come June.

That meant that if Jordan and Scottie Pippen were having off nights (as they did Tuesday night) ... and if their lineup had holes in it because of an injury (as it did Tuesday night, with Toni Kukoc nursing a bad foot) or suspension (a possibility any night with Dennis Rodman) ... and the only thing that separated them from the next-best team was getting the important calls down the stretch ... well, the Bulls would take victory that way, too.

"They," Jordan said, referring to the Sonics with a less-than-charitable bent, "had their chances."

They will almost certainly get their chance at the Bulls once more, at the end of the season, and they'll have to be content with close then, too. Four games to two in the Finals, in fact, sounds close enough.