An interesting sidelight to the ’90s rivalry between the Chicago Bulls and New York Knicks was the beef between Scottie Pippen and Larry Johnson during the 1996-97 season.
The Pip-LJ feud began after the first regular-season meeting between the Bulls and Knicks. Scottie criticized the trade that brought Johnson to the Knicks, saying their rivals lost toughness by giving up Anthony Mason for LJ. Johnson kept quiet, but after shutting down Pip to 14 points on 4-18 shooting during their second matchup of the season, he called Scottie a ‘bum‘ and said the Bulls were nothing without Mike.
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From there, it became a back-and-forth between the two star forwards, and right before the start of the 1997 NBA playoffs, Pippen talked about his row with Johnson during an interview with Jim Gray.
“It’s not really much about me, about him,” explained Pippen. “It was a comment that he made about myself, about our team, how he felt like that we are as team, Michael’s cottailers if you want to say that. Definitely, when he made the comment about me personally, it was kind of touching at that moment for me.”
Pip had all the edge over LJ except contract money
Although Scottie started the not-so-friendly exchange between the two, he had every right to get mad at being called a bum, especially in 1997. Pippen had made the All-NBA First Team three straight years from 1994 to 1996, and in 1993-94, when Mike retired, he proved that he could be the main man for the Bulls.
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Meanwhile, aside from winning Rookie of the Year honors in 1992 and making the All-NBA second team in 1993, Pippen said Johnson had accomplished nothing to give him the right to criticize anybody, not especially him. Perhaps the only advantage LJ had on Pip during that time was having more dollars on his NBA contract.
“I don’t think it gets underneath my skin,” said Pippen when Gray asked him if Johnson making more money than him added more provocation. “But it does allow him to speak very highly of himself, that he’s overpaid, and he feels like that may be the edge he has over me.”
LJ also bragged about his shoe deal
Pippen may have a point about Johnson getting confidence from his contracts. It can be recalled that after he signed a shoe deal with Converse, he bragged about having a larger shoe deal than Michael Jordan.
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“In 1991, I received the largest shoe deal in history. Michael Jordan was making $500k a year from #nike, and #converse was paying me $1 million. Mike was never mad. He actually called me up and thanked me. He said his shoe deal was up in a few months, and he was going to make #nikeshoes pay him a lot more. Jordan was just as good in business as he was on the court,” Johnson wrote on Facebook.
Aside from having a huge shoe deal with Converse, LJ also signed a mammoth 12-year $84 million deal in 1993, which at that time was the largest contract in the NBA’s history. That contract dwarfed the five-year $18 million deal that Pippen signed in 1991 and griped about until 1998.