This is my first blog at Pro Basket-blog and I'm very excited to be a part of the crew. Matt Becker, Joe Romano, Tapan Jani, Kevin Connors and Shawn Gorman are some of the brightest basketball minds around and my only hope is that I can keep up with their high standards when it comes to insight, analysis and humor.
The team over here on Pro Basket-blog are very big Scottie Pippen fans. We know a lot about Pip and Pip means a lot to us. When this is the case, sometimes, it can be quite difficult to say everything that you want to. So instead, we have limited ourselves to one paragraph each.
Below, along with our paragraphs, we have gathered quotes from various sources. To truly understand the complexity of Scottie Pippen the person, you had to know him. To truly understand the brilliance of Scottie Pippen the basketball player, you had to have played with him.
"MJ was pegged Air-Jordan, but nobody seemed to glide through the air like Pippen on his one-handed dunks. I always tried to emulate Pip on my 5-foot plastic hoop in my basement. Nothing but good memories." -Shawn Gorman
"Scottie Pippen was the ultimate glue guy. There isn't a player I would rather have on my team. He was unassuming, yet confident. Unheralded, yet revered. Underappreciated, yet invaluable." -Matt Becker
"I was only 9 when this game happened, so I had check some stats at basketball reference. The Christmas Day game in 96 is a game that reminds me of Scottie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyFerF58zkE). The Bulls set the win mark the season before and were off to a pretty good start (24-3). The Pistons, though, were nipping at their heels (20-5). Scottie shared the game high with Grant Hill at 27, but Pip also had 8 boards and 8 assists to go along with 2 steals and 2 blocks. He made five threes, most of them early, but he didn't need to score a ton to make his presence felt. In a game where the Bulls needed to show who the top dog in the division was, Scottie filled up the stat sheet.
I enjoyed watching 33 because he brought it night-in and night-out. He made the flat top work too. " -Joe Romano
"He is the one who played defense and took charges. He is the one who endorsed Zippin. He is the one who Jordan leaned on in the end. He is the one who sacrificed his body. He is the one...who taught us all that the mailman doesn't deliver on Sundays. Thank you, Scottie." -Kevin Connors
"Scottie was a player with great vision. If you look closely, you can see that his number reflected this well. Wearing 33, and exhibiting a quality of bringing a team together, Pip made it clear that three and three make six. Not only was this the amount of Bulls championships, but also symbolic of two 3-peats. We love you, sir." -Tapan Jani
"Growing up, playing on the driveway, I wanted to be Scottie Pippen. I loved Scottie for his imperfections. He seemed more real because of them. Bulls fans shared with him in his highest of highs and his lowest of lows. He grew up, sometimes in a very painful way, right in front of us.
If there is anything in sports that I could ever change, it would be that Scottie could have won that title without Michael. Because he didn't, he will always be one of the most underrated players in NBA history. To say that knowing that he will be in the Hall of Fame tells you just how special Scottie was.
We saw this skinny kid, who was the youngest of 12, from Hamburg, Arkansas win six championships. And tonight, he reaches basketball immortality. Congrats Pip." -Vineeth Hemavathi
"I can't lie, how you feel about Scottie Pippen is a referendum on how I feel about you as a basketball fan. If you don't think Pip was one of the 25 or so best players of all time, I don't think I want you in my life as a basketball fan. " -M. Haubs of The Painted Area
"I care about an exceptional athlete who redefined a position, a guy who allowed MJ to be MJ, a guy with enough rings for two hands. There has been no one like him before or since. I care about that." -Bill Simmons
“You’ve got to understand, LeBron has no business even being in the same conversation with Scottie. Scottie was the epitome of the (do it all elite player). What do you want me to say? Scottie was great.” -Dennis Rodman
"There are players who have won more in basketball’s Hall of Fame, though not many more than Scottie Pippen with his six championships playing for the Bulls. There certainly are players who have scored more, shot better, jumped higher, run faster and been more popular. But there may be no one tougher than Scottie Pippen." -Sam Smith
“To this day, that was my favorite team. We would have gone to the Finals if it weren’t for a horrible call in New York. Scottie was clearly the leader of that team. He stepped up and he was the man.” -Jerry Reinsdorf on the 1993-1994 Chicago Bulls
“His greatest strength was his knowledge of how things worked on the defensive end of the floor. Scottie was the voice of our team—figuratively and literally, as he did a lot of the talking and kept our team on the same page. When he wasn’t at the top of the key harassing a guard as a special assignment, he was on the backside of our defense talking his teammates through different situations, whether it was a double team, trap or some other important aspect." -Phil Jackson
“Scottie was my favorite teammate to play with. Despite how the media depicted him and some of the incidents that happened off the court, when you have a teammate like Scottie who is willing to stand up for his actions on the floor, good or bad, it makes playing with him and the team chemistry a whole lot better.” -Bill Wennington
"Scottie would score four points and dominate the game." -Steve Kerr
"In all of the videos, you never just saw me. You saw Scottie Pippen. Every championship that I won." -Michael Jordan
Enjoy your night Scottie
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