Jordan: Winning 6th NBA title with Bulls was ‘trying year’

CHARLOTTE, N.C (AP) — Michael Jordan described his final NBA championship season with the Chicago Bulls as a “trying year.”

“We all were all trying to enjoy that year knowing it was coming to an end,” Jordan told Good Morning America on Thursday via video conference from his home in Florida.

Jordan appeared on the show to promote the “The Last Dance,” a 10-part documentary series focused on the final year of the 90′s Bulls dynasty that won six NBA titles in eight years.

The series will begin airing Sunday night on ESPN in the United States and on Netflix internationally over five consecutive Sunday nights through May 17. There will be two hour-long episodes on each of those nights, airing back-to-back at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern.

“The beginning of the season, it started when (general manager) Jerry Krause told (coach) Phil Jackson that we could go 82-0 and he would never get a chance to come back,” Jordan said. “Knowing that I had married myself to him, and if he wasn’t going to be the coach, then obviously I wasn’t going to play. So Phil started off the season saying this was the last dance — and we played it that way.”

Jordan said from that point on the team focused on completing the task of a second three-peat.

“Mentally it tugged at you that this had to come to an end, but it also centered our focus to making sure we ended it right,” Jordan said. “As sad as it sounded at the beginning of the year, we tried to rejoice and enjoy the year and finish it off the right way.”

The documentary was originally scheduled to be released in June during the NBA Finals, but ESPN made the decision to accelerate its release due to the lack of live sports programming because of the coronavirus pandemic. The series has been billed to include never-before-seen footage from that season, during which the team chased its sixth championship in a span of eight years.

ESPN said the series includes “extensive profiles of Jordan’s key teammates including Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Steve Kerr,” along with Jackson.