Air vs. Glide. Beast of the East vs. Best in the West. Defending champs vs. talented challengers. The players and teams everyone wanted to see in the NBA Finals.
Yet here they are, the Chicago Bulls and Portland Trail Blazers, exchanging airballs and turnovers, sputtering and slopping their way to a series tie heading into tonight's Game 5.These are the two best teams in basketball?
"You talk about the athletes on the floor, Michael Jordan and Clyde Drexler, you expect to see some high-flying stuff," Portland coach Rick Adelman said Thursday. "But both teams' success really depends on how well we defend. We take away the things each other does well.
"Both teams have great defenses. That's why we're here. It is more of a counterpunching, half-court situation."
Coaches and players say both teams haven't played their best.
Believe them.
"It was an exhibition of ineptitude that both teams played," Chicago coach Phil Jackson said, explaining a series of fourth-quarter turnovers and botched layups in Portland's 93-88 victory Wednesday.
The Bulls are mad because they've blown two fourth-quarter leads. The Blazers are upset that the Bulls give them so little credit.
"We've been in control of every game, but we've made some mental mistakes that have cost us," said Scottie Pippen, one of Chicago's most mistake-prone players. "We had them on the ropes in Game 2 and Game 4. It's just a matter of going out and playing better overall."
Adelman is amused by the Bulls' self-pity.
"As far as I know, they haven't changed the rules for the Finals," he said. "The games are still 48 minutes long. If the Bulls only play for 42, that's not our problem.
"They think they should have won the series already. But if they wanted to be 4-0 and celebrating and dancing on someone's graves, they should have won those two games."
The Trail Blazers have won two of the last three games despite playing well offensively for only a few stretches.
Their victories were not pretty. Neither was Chicago's win in Game 3.
This series features two teams that do nothing easily.
The Bulls rolled through the playoffs last season with only two losses. They have had at least two defeats in each of their last three rounds this postseason.
"It's never easy," said Jordan, who has blamed late-game fatigue for his failure in the clutch in Games 2 and 4. "Any time you lose and you feel you should have won, you're going to stay up late thinking about things you should have done or could have done. I'm tired mentally and physically."
The Trail Blazers have a penchant for getting off to terrible starts. Sometimes they rally. Sometimes they don't. In Game 4, they were down by 10 before they scored their first point, trailed by as many as 13 and were still losing by seven with less than nine minutes to play.
"Boy, if they say it's not easy, they ought to take a joyride in our vehicle," Portland's Terry Porter said. "We seem to make things tough on ourselves all the time. In that way, it's the same for both teams."
Jordan said the Bulls face the extra burden of having to defend their title. Thursday, he brought back the dreaded "C-word" - complacency - which had been used often during their early round struggles but hadn't been uttered since the Finals started.
"The complacency sets in. It's there. It's evident. We've been fighting it all season," he said. "The attitude's not the same as last year. We tasted success, and the intensity's not there at the same level.
"Last year, we understood the challenge we were faced with. Here, we understand but we tend to forget . . . the hunger that the other team has."
Portland's Jerome Kersey said the Trail Blazers wanted Game 4 more than the Bulls did, a fact Jordan didn't dispute.
"They played like it," he said. "But if they did want it more, that's very disappointing."
So Jackson and Jordan have teamed up to challege their team to play better. The coach and the leader want the Bulls to get mad. If there's one thing the Bulls have done well is respond to adversity - they have yet to lose two playoff games in a row.
"The home crowd will be trying to inspire them, so we have to inspire ourselves," Jordan said. "It's ours to win. We control our own destiny. I don't think they control it."
They - the Trail Blazers - believe they have two more wins in them. Pretty or ugly, it doesn't matter how they get them.
And don't tell them that their first two wins were gifts from the benevolent, complacent, tired Chicago Bulls.
"They've done a lot of talking; I choose not to talk so much," Adelman said. "They're a very good team. But we have a pretty fair team, too. We've got two wins because we've earned them. We'll play hard to earn another."