![]() ![]() Then there was Game 6, ultimately the moment the entire documentary has been leading up to the moment that still stings Jazz fans even 22 years later. The Jazz held on to a late lead in Game 5 to win by two and stay alive. ![]() Utah took Game 1 before Chicago won the next three to take charge of the series. Confident BullsĮntering the 1998 Finals, with many observers believing the Jazz were the better team, LaRue remembers the Bulls being “confident” they would win. “He knew that’s what I could bring to the table to make the team better and gave me the confidence going out as a rookie,” LaRue said. #rookie #TheLastDance- Rusty LaRue April 24, 2020 2OT win I played 31 mins going 4-6 with 8 points. game was my first ever NBA action! Went 3-5 with 7 points in 14 mins. He was waived, however, just a few hours before Chicago’s first preseason game and was selected in the CBA expansion draft by the Idaho Stampede.Įpisode 1 of The Last Dance brought back some great memories. Eventually, he ended up playing in France and then the Connecticut Pride of the Continental Basketball Association.Īs talk swirled that the 1997-98 season would be the last for the Bulls’ Hall of Fame nucleus, LaRue got another invite to Chicago’s training camp after playing for the team during the summer league (yes, he got the team manual with “The Last Dance” cover). (It) just kind of brings that home of what a blessed kind of career I had, and I’m grateful for it,” he said by phone last week.Ī three-sport athlete at Wake Forest, LaRue played summer league ball with the Houston Rockets after graduation in 1996, then was invited to training camp by the Chicago Bulls. “I’ve been blessed through the game, and this whole experience of getting to kind of relive ‘The Last Dance’. Then, less than four years later, he found himself playing for the same Utah franchise that the Bulls had dispatched in back-to-back Finals. Rusty LaRue, now a restaurant executive from North Carolina and former NBA player, didn’t reach the 100-games-played mark during a career that spanned five NBA seasons, but he does hold this unique distinction: He was a teammate of all four players and played for both Jackson and Sloan.Īs a 24-year-old rookie on the Chicago Bulls’ 1997-98 championship team that is the subject of the ESPN documentary “The Last Dance,” LaRue had a perfect view of the sequence of plays at the end of Game 6 that is still painful for Jazz fans everywhere. SALT LAKE CITY - In a who’s who of NBA legends, Hall of Famers Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Karl Malone and John Stockton would certainly be four names on just about any list, as would coaches Phil Jackson and Jerry Sloan. ![]()
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