He didn't "almost take the Bulls to the Finals". Not even making the conference finals is not "almost the Finals". Sorry. Not to mention it was far from a one man show. Yeah he was their best player, but his impact on an offense was nowhere near the level of a Jordan. It's not like he was a nightmare or hard to handle for an opposing defense. As far as defense, it's a lot easier to be all-world defensively when you don't have all the responsibility of carrying an offense on your shoulders. You can expend a lot more energy on the defensive end, which is what Pippen did with Chicago while he sat back and watched Jordan go to work on the other end. I don't recall any "Pippen Rules". "Pippen was his Shaq/Gasol" - can you explain that, particularly the Shaq piece of that? Is that some kind of relative comparison to Shaq's contributions? Surely not. I'm pretty confident that had Pippen never been drafted by the Bulls and they would have been forced to build a different team around Jordan, he would have won the same number of championships.
Pippen is Nba top 50 player he. He had all star offense and D. It would be pretty hard to replace that. Jordan might have got one no telling with who though.
Pippen was one bad call away from taking his team to the Easter Conference Finals. Would have been matched up vs. the Pacers who they had a favorable match up versus. There is an article that came out on Espn recently, feel free to look it up. Then Pippen would have defeated the Rockets. Remind me again what exactly Mj did without Pippen? If Pippen would have been paired with another scorer he could have still won titles, in the line of Drexler or Wilkens. You can replace scoring but you can not replace the things Pippen did. As for your Jordan go to work, Pippen ran the offense for the 1st 3 quarters plus which allowed Jordan to rest up for the final push.
If we're talking about replacing Pippen with his equivalent in trade, then I wholeheartedly agree with you. (For instance had the Shawn Kemp - Scottie Pippen trade in 1994 gone through, the Bulls would have still won, IMHO.) There's nothing intrinsic to Scottie that would make him irreplaceable, atleast nothing that Michael couldn't replace. If you'll remember, MJ led that team to 60 wins in a year when Pip missed I believe over 30 games with back issues. However, my mockery of Wayne Hall was regarding the notion that they could win merely without Pippen. From the dialogue, they didn't seem to have qualified the statement allowing for his trade of equal return.
