There probably isn’t anyone painted in a more poor light by The Last Dance than Jerry Krause, the Chicago Bulls former general manager who had a contentious relationship with the team’s superstar, Michael Jordan, throughout Jordan’s tenure in Chicago.
Krause was the butt of many jokes, typically about his height and weight, as Jordan and Scottie Pippen never missed a chance to verbally dunk on the team’s top executive. They also made sure to try and make him look bad at every possible moment on the court, attacking anyone they knew to be a personal favorite of Krause’s on the opposing team. This is what led to Toni Kukoc’s baptism by fire in the 1992 Olympics and Jordan said he went after Dan Majerle in the 1993 Finals for the same reason.
Krause died in 2017 and as such is not able to defend himself in the documentary, as it must lean on past interviews for his side of stories, but Krause was working on a memoir when he died that explores a lot of these issues. K.C. Johnson of NBC Sports Chicago was given excerpts of Krause’s memoir by the Krause family, and on Monday he published one that details Krause’s fraught relationship with Jordan — one that was driven by both men’s intense desire to win at all costs.
It goes into Jordan’s foot injury his sophomore year and the minutes restriction he was placed on — which was the start of the tension between the two. Krause explains his side of certain decisions and how he was always looking to do what’s best for the team, but in one section he notes that Jordan did the same at the end of his career.
After the 1998 season, prior to officially announcing his retirement, Jordan severed a tendon in his shooting hand with a cigar cutter — the most Jordan injury possible — and required surgery. As Krause recalls in the memoir, Jordan very easily could’ve decided to force the Bulls into giving him a contract and gone on the disabled list with the injury to collect millions, but instead retired.
To his everlasting credit, at the end of his time with the Bulls he could have really screwed the franchise big time and he didn’t. In the summer after winning the last championship he’d cut his index finger of his shooting hand very badly with a cigar cutter. It was seriously questionable if he could regain enough movement in the finger to be himself again as a shooter. He could have easily put us in an extremely tough situation by saying he wanted to play and force us to sign him to the biggest contract in team sports history. It would then have been easy to go on the disabled list with the finger injury and spend the rest of that strike-shortened season picking up checks every two weeks and not playing at all. But Michael being Michael, once he signed a contract, he gave you a thousand percent effort and would not think of stiffing you.
The entire excerpt Johnson published is an interesting look into how Krause viewed Jordan and their relationship that was fraught with issues. Throughout, there’s a level of respect for what Jordan did, but an acknowledgment that while they both had the same goal, their methods and thoughts on how to get to those goals was different.
