The Director Of ‘The Last Dance’ Revealed ‘The One Thing The NBA Pushed Back On’

One of the main themes throughout The Last Dance was that everyone on the Chicago Bulls really did not like Jerry Krause all that much. Krause, who passed away in 2017, was the franchise’s general manager as it won six NBA championships during the Michael Jordan era, and received criticism from just about everyone on the team.

It was not always fair how much hate Krause got, and it led to a really tense moment where he was booed by Bulls fans at a Ring of Honor. And in a recent interview with Pablo Torre, the doc’s director, Jason Hehir, explained that there was one moment that the NBA pushed back on during the creation of the doc, and it involved Scottie Pippen’s disdain for Krause.

“The one thing that the NBA pushed back on, in the entirety of this, process was a clip where Scottie, in the locker room — they were joking around, saying what they were gonna do when they won the title,” Hehir explained. “And Scottie, I’m paraphrasing here, basically said, ‘I’m gonna stick a cattle prod up Jerry Krause’s butt and give that a guy a heart attack,’ or something like that. And everybody laughed. But it wasn’t, like, ‘Oh my god, keep the cattle prods away from Scottie,’ he said it in the heat of the moment.

“So, I included that in our rough cuts because I wanted people to see what this guy was going through day in and day out,” he continued. “And that’s the one thing that they made me take out in three or four years of doing this. It wasn’t, like, Michael calling people a b*tch or anything, it wasn’t that, it was that comment from Scottie to Jerry Krause.”

Hehir explained that he hoped the team’s open disdain for Krause would end up making him a more empathetic figure with people who watched the doc, but that backfired, and the public believed that the filmmakers had it out for Krause, which he stressed was “not the intent.”