Joe Smith

Wallace, for one, remembers that series well. “Joe was playing like a one-man gang,” Big Ben says. “Milwaukee was a perimeter-oriented team, and Joe was pretty much the only guy doing the dirty work down low. We had a lot of big bodies—me, ’Sheed [Wallace], Tay [Prince], Mehmet [Okur]—it didn’t matter to him. Joe took us all on.”

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“I understand that the Bulls are looking to me to be a leader,” Smith says. “But that’s not something that even needed to be formally talked about. I believe my personality lends itself to leadership and support of my teammates. I can’t imagine anything happening in Chicago to change that.”

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“Yeah, I’ll joke and goof around a little before the game, but for those 48 minutes [of the game] out on the court, I’m all business,” Smith says. “There’s nothing more important than winning.”