1998 NBA Finals
1998 basketball championship series
The 1998 NBA Finals was the championship series of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) 1997–98 season, and the conclusion of the season's playoffs. The two-time defending NBA champion and Eastern Conference champion Chicago Bulls played against the Western Conference champion Utah Jazz, with the Jazz holding home-court advantage for the first 2 games in Salt Lake City. In a repeat of the previous year's Finals, the Bulls defeated the Jazz in six games for their third consecutive NBA title and their sixth in eight seasons.
Michael Jordan was voted the NBA Finals MVP of the series (he also had won the award the last five times the Bulls won the Finals: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, and 1997). This would be his sixth NBA championship and sixth Finals MVP award in six full basketball seasons. This would be his final season of winning the NBA championship and Finals MVP. Until 2021 this would be the last finals not to feature a team from California, Florida, or Texas.
The 1998 Finals garnered the highest Nielsen TV ratings in NBA history at 18.7, and even surpassed the Nielsen ratings for the 1998 World Series, marking the first time the NBA had a higher rating in its championship round than of Major League Baseball's championship round.
The Bulls headed into the series as the underdogs. Bulls' small forward Scottie Pippen stated, "It's a different feeling. We’ve never been in this situation where we’ve sort of been written off.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1998 NBA Finals” as 1998 basketball championship series. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 1998 basketball championship series. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4593827. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1997, 1991 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “1998 NBA Finals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.