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Jerry Krause doesn’t get enough credit for what he did with the Chicago Bulls. Not only did he not make the mistake Houston and Portland made in not taking Michael Jordan (the Bulls took him third in the 1984 draft), but he quickly paired him with Scottie Pippen.

For the first three teams in the league, the Bulls placed guys like Bill Cartwright, Horace Grant and John Paxson around their Dynamic Duo.

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Jordan, of course, walked away from basketball after the 1993 championship, but returned in 1995.

The team had already been rebuilt to some extent, particularly with the trade of Grant, but Krause has once again assembled a brilliant group. He still had Pippen and, of course, Jordan was back. But the core of the rotation had been rebuilt, and brilliantly so.

Chicago brought in shooter Steve Kerr, Australian big man Luc Longley, Ron Harper, Dennis Rodman and a player Krause had long coveted, Toni Kukoc.

Krause had long celebrated Kukoc, a native of Croatia, to the point that Jordan and Pippen were sick of hearing about him, so they did everything they could to shut him down when the Dream Team faced Croatia in the 1992 Olympics.

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But Krause wasn’t wrong: Kukoc was great. Not really good. Great.

At 6-11, Kukoc had point guard skills, as you’ll see here, and fit in perfectly with that team. You wanted to keep Jordan and Pippen on the court as much as possible, but you could add Rodman, Kukoc and Harper to almost everyone else on the court and have perhaps the most versatile team in NBA history.

That team truly invented positionless basketball, and did so decades before the term was even considered.

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