Background
The Utah Jazz made the NBA Finals for the first time, mainly due to the exploits of its All-Star duo in John Stockton and league MVP Karl Malone. Stockton joined the Jazz as the 16th pick of the 1984 NBA Draft, while Malone arrived as the 13th pick of the 1985 NBA Draft. They initially played backup to Adrian Dantley and Rickey Green before coming into their own by 1987. The Jazz would break through in the 1988 NBA Playoffs, losing a hard-fought seven-game series to the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers in the conference semifinals. Early in the 1988–89 season Frank Layden stepped aside from the coaching ranks and assistant Jerry Sloan took over.
By 1992, the Jazz were an NBA power, reaching their first Western Conference Final that year, and then advanced to that level two more times in the next four seasons. The 1996 NBA Playoffs would see Utah lose a hard-fought seven-game conference final series to the Seattle SuperSonics, which many saw as the beginning of their ascension to the NBA's elite. They would put it all together the next season, winning 64 games to earn the top seed in the Western Conference. They would sweep the Los Angeles Clippers in the opening round, then eliminated the Los Angeles Lakers in five games of the second round, and then with John Stockton hitting the buzzer-beating trey in Game 6, eliminated the Houston Rockets to advance to their first NBA Final in franchise history.
For the Chicago Bulls, the campaign was almost identical to their record-breaking 1995–96 season, although they would finish a game shy of another 70-win season. They swept the Washington Bullets in the first round, then dispatched the Atlanta Hawks in a five-game second round series, and then defeat the Miami Heat in five games of the conference finals.
Read more about this topic: 1997 NBA Finals
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“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
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“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
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