Bulls Learned to Remain Calm, Save Best Effort : Game 4: Jackson hasn’t allowed players to become bedeviled by three-peat pressure.

CHICAGO —  Even as he was purposely avoiding making a third consecutive NBA championship a goal for his Chicago Bulls, Coach Phil Jackson was preparing for it.

Jackson and his assistants spent part of last summer talking about the challenge of winning three titles in a row, and the burden that goes with it. They interviewed coaches from different sports and different eras, Pat Riley to Tony La Russa to Red Holzman. As it turned out, maybe Riley contributed to the Bulls beating his Knicks.

What Jackson learned was mostly psychological--don’t make defense of the title a constant battle cry because it only builds pressure--and tempered that with a change in on-court tactics. Thus Chicago didn’t panic when New York finished with the best record in the East because the Bulls were resting and lying low, not unleashing their defensive traps on a regular basis. It was especially beneficial to Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, wholost much of their off-season because they played in the Olympics.

Chicago swept Atlanta in the first round, Cleveland in the next. In the Eastern Conference finals, the Bulls lost the first two games to New York and then won four in a row. In the NBA finals, they have a 2-1 lead over the Phoenix Suns heading into Game 4 tonight at Chicago Stadium.

“It’s not so much the pressure at this point,” said Jackson, who also won a title as a player with the Knicks. “The pressure was to get here, get to the Eastern Conference finals. We said we had to do that, and that’s where the pressure was. Now that we’re here, it’s a reality. You can’t play here when you are still in the first round, the second round, the third round of the playoffs. We had to find a way to really be sharp then, so we could be here now.”

The Lakers and Detroit Pistons have been “here” within the last four years. Each team won two in a row and was in contention for something no team has accomplished this generation, but Riley and the Lakers lost in the finals in 1989. The Pistons got to the Eastern Conference finals in 1991 before losing to Chicago, and talked afterward as if a weight had been lifted off their backs.

The Bulls are two victories away from doing what no team has accomplished since the Boston Celtics of the mid-1960s--winning three consecutive NBA titles. So how did they decide to deal with the pressure? Simple.

They decided not to.

“We don’t really think about it in terms of a three-peat,” center Bill Cartwright said. “We think of it in terms of a championship. We can think about three in a row, but right now we have the same attitude like we haven’t won anything and that this is our first championship.”

Added John Paxson: “A lot of it is mental. I think our team has always been real strong mentally. We haven’t been complacent at all. We only won 57 games this year, but we never really faltered mentally.

“One of the other things is that you get asked about it repeatedly. It’s always there, the presence of it. This three-peat thing has become such a big thing now. But we’re all right. We’ve got strong, mental people on this team, and we have been able to deal with it.”

That much has been proved in the playoffs, where Jordan and Pippen are playing more minutes than during the regular season and hadn’t shown any signs of fatigue until the triple-overtimeGame 3.

NBA Notes

Charles Barkley continues to rest his badly bruised right elbow, which he said is still sore and tonight might need to be drained for the second time. He played 53 minutes Sunday despite an injury that probably would have kept him out of a regular-season game. He was injured in a hard fall in Game 2. . . . Chicago’s Scott Williams is playing well at the right time; he will become a restricted free agent in two weeks. Taking advantage of the showcase that comes with the series, the product of Wilson High in Hacienda Heights had 10 rebounds in only 23 minutes of Game 1, nine points and a team-high three blocked shots the next, and 14 rebounds (six on offense) in 46 minutes as a reserve in Game 3.