HUMBOLDT PARK — As the Golden State Warriors sit on the cusp of winning back-to-back NBA titles, a local journalist reflects on the team they were compared to most of the season— The 1996 Chicago Bulls.
The Warriors recently went 73-9, breaking the record for most regular season wins previously held by the 1996 Chicago Bulls.
Jack M. Silverstein, a journalist and avid Chicago Bulls fan, recently wrote a book, "How The GOAT Was Built: 6 Life Lessons From The 1996 Chicago Bulls," an homage to that championship team.
He says his initial goal was to only write an essay.
"I kept doing more research and I kicked around the possibility of expanding the essay," Silverstein said. "I used six lessons because six is my favorite number and there's six championships."
The book has six chapters, each named after a life lesson that Silverstein, a Humboldt Park resident, learned by watching the Bulls. Chapters include "Don’t be afraid to push your limits — or to find peace and excellence within them" and "Think creatively about your shortcomings."
An Evanston, IL native, Silverstein, 34, is a corporate journalist with the Seyfarth Shaw Law Firm. He previously worked as a staff writer for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. He says most Bulls fans are unaware that the teams who won the championship in the first and second three-peats were two very different teams.
"They were constructed through different principles. They were two different teams," Silverstein said. "I thought it was interesting that Jerry Krause [the Bulls team general manager] rebuilt the team other than the three most important pieces: Jordan, Pippen and Jackson."
Silverstein is such a fan of this era of Bulls history that he re-watched game six of the 1998 NBA Finals, when Michael Jordan hit the game-winning jump shot, so he could live-tweet it.
I live-tweeted the final 6 minutes of Michael Jordan's greatest game -- the last he played with the @chicagobulls.https://t.co/TP9pnqtsSF
— Jack M Silverstein (@readjack) June 15, 2016
Silverstein told DNAinfo he hadn't realized what the '96 Bulls team did would ultimately influence how he approached obstacles in life.
"I got so consumed with my research. Twenty years later, we're still talking about this team," Silverstein said. "There were life lessons I used without even realizing it. As a camp counselor, a teacher, a softball coach, I thought about my perspective on leadership and building a team."
Silverstein says he thinks his perspective will stand out from the volumes written about Chicago's most iconic era in basketball history.
"This is the most comprehensive, fully-researched third-person work on the '96 Bulls that I have been able to find anywhere," Silverstein said. "I know I make for a fun fan story, and the fan story is true for sure, but this is an academic work first and foremost. Lots of research, reading, etc. went into this, and I hope that comes through."
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