Triangle Plotting

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, especially when current reality, if not exactly the end of the world, is a world that at least is largely paused by a pandemic. One may relax at home, whether having viewed this miniseries when it originally aired on the ESPN channel back when Earth had largely closed for business, or catching up on it now that it's being streamed on Netflix, and recall better times--such as when the NBA didn't need to, for resuming their unfinished season, resort to quarantining themselves off from the rest of society inside Disney World. Maybe younger viewers or those who didn't care about basketball in the 1990s will enjoy this, too, and learn that, yes, Michael Jordan was a big deal. Still is, as "The Last Dance" demonstrates.

Under such a consideration, it's almost forgivable that this 10-part miniseries is longer than justified--that a documentary titled "The Last Dance," with the focus being on the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls season when the franchise won its sixth championship, actually spends a lot of time rehashing the team's prior seasons primarily through the lens of Jordan's career. Almost forgivable. I mean, why not an epilogue on Jordan's years with the Washington Wizards while they're at it. I used to follow the NBA more closely than I do nowadays, especially so back in the Jordan era, and the middle sections of each episode here is the same sort of promotional material and highlight reels one finds in the mini-docs made about every championship team. I have a DVD set on the Bulls dynasty with them; I've seen this stuff already--on top of having followed it as it happened. The new interviews added to this offers very little of interest for the most part to these second acts of each episode. Oh, Jordan still hates Isiah Thomas... OK. The series also is noticeably strained at times to invent connections between the past and the past before that in some installments. We see the Bulls taking on Charles Barkley's Phoenix Suns to complete their first three-peat, for instance, and this helps tell the story of the second three-peat how? Because John Paxson and Steve Kerr were both reliable at hitting open spot-up jump shots? Neat insight, I guess.

The newly released footage of the camera crew's wide-access, behind-the-scenes action of the 97-98 Bulls, on the other hand, combined with the interviews of some of the players in the organization who are now older and, perhaps, wiser and more candid is compelling, though. Even if many scenes don't show us much more than that these celebrities tend to use cruder language when not hounded by reporters and live broadcasts (Magic Johnson's face when he realized he needed to get back into character, so to speak, when he sees the camera was particularly amusing), or that Jordan, indeed, did like smoking cigars and gambling, these images do humanize them--make them more relatable as real people instead of icons on posters to be worshiped on children's bedroom walls or automatons stating in press conferences that "both teams played hard."

The timeline jumping of the series, however, distracts from much of this and, perhaps, took up space where more details of the second three-peat team could've occupied. Even the priorities of the footage concerned with that "last dance" seem misplaced in part. Kerr, for one, receives far more attention than his status on that team demands--probably because by subsequently becoming a broadcaster and then a coach he's remained prominent in the league. Scott Burrell gets a surprising amount of screen time, too, for a guy I forgot was even on that team. On the other hand, after he slams Craig Ehlo's guarding of Jordan, where's Ron Harper--you know, the starter who Kerr came off the bench for? Why not mention how his presence on the court with three other multi-positional defender-extraordinaires (Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman) allowed for an unusual capability to switch assignments on defense, which is pretty handy against screens and pick-and-rolls. Where's Luc Longley? Why not mention how the Bulls and every other team back then needed these bulky 7-footers because basketball, for basically its entire history until recently, was largely played in the post and through the center position, and if you didn't have a few guys who could approach the size of, say, Shaquille O'Neal, your team was going to be punished for it.

A lot of the commentary in "The Last Dance" is banal, if not hagiography. Yeah, yeah, Jordan was the best player in the game, and Pippen was the best second option, and Rodman the best role player, and Phil Jackson the best coach, and management blew it all up in the end under some feeble philosophy of re-building. It's actually in the middle of the show where they briefly get at the heart of Jordan's, this team's and the league's popularity. In addition to Mike's stellar performance on the court and his likable personality, he came of age in the era of globalization and greater corporate power. Sure, the NBA was reaching new heights of fame in the United States during the Bird-Magic rivalry, but the "Dream Team" of the Olympics and, more important probably, Jordan's selling shoes and sugar water, made him a figure of global adoration. That's how the NBA became the most popular team sport exported from America, and it's largely why we get nostalgic watching "The Last Dance." Jordan retired a couple decades ago, but he still makes more from Air Jordan's than any current athlete does from sneaker deals. The "Be Like Mike" obsession continues.