Am I “basic” if I’m fired up for “The Last Dance?” I don’t care. Call me “basic.”

In case you somehow missed it, Sunday night is the beginning of the 10-part documentary on Michael Jordan and the 1998 Chicago Bulls. Two episodes will air each week, starting at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN and ESPN2. If anything on TV gets higher ratings during this quarantine, well, I’ll be stunned.

The advanced release of this — it was originally scheduled for June — is exactly what the doctor ordered. Two hours of this every Sunday night for the next 5 weeks is worth getting excited about.

Why is there a 10-part series, you ask? Those teams, and Jordan especially, were so guarded. Even living in the suburbs of Chicago and loving that team as much as anything in the world, you never really felt like you got that insight. The fact that a documentary crew got to follow that team around was a surprising revelation in itself. This footage, which has been 20 years in the making, is finally going to see the light of day.

So yes, you better believe that 10 hours of this is going to be worth consuming. In honor of those 10 hours of this doc, I decided to ask 10 questions that I hope we’ll see answered.

1. What was the extent of Jordan’s gambling?

Obviously that’s no secret. It’ll be discussed, and hopefully at length. Jordan’s competitive drive has always been at the root of his gambling, whether it was cards on the plane or spending long nights at the casino.

In those later years when it was such a grind in the regular season, was Jordan gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars on plane rides to Atlanta? I want the “I played blackjack until 5 in the morning and lost $1 million” stories. I want to hear more about how Jordan used to have the in-stadium promotions team tip him who was going to win one of those “which number has the basketball under it” games … which he’d then bet a teammate $100 on during timeouts.

With 10 hours, you can really dig into this angle because in its essence, it’s why Jordan is so unique. He doesn’t think of it as “gambling.” He infamously believed he could win at anything.

2. What went down with the Jordan-Steve Kerr fight(s)?

Kerr is a pretty big focal point of the doc because he’s widely considered one of the top coaches of the last decade but also because he had some epic practice scrums with Jordan. That story from 1995 is already out there. Trash-talking turned into Kerr and Jordan throwing hands with the smaller Kerr ending up with a black eye.

But was that all? Or were there times during that 1998 season when they were at each other’s throats? That’s not difficult to imagine understanding Jordan’s competitiveness and Kerr’s desire to never back down. And was there any sort of freezing out of Kerr? We all know that Kerr knocked down one of the biggest shots in NBA history to clinch the 1997 NBA Finals, but hopefully both he and Jordan will add some more context to some of their intra-practice beef:

3. How close was the Scottie Pippen trade to actually happening?

At the start of that final season, Pippen demanded a trade and was content to sit out the season. That’s not a rumor. This quote from a 1997 story in The Chicago Tribune is stunning to look back on:

“I’m very serious about this,” Pippen said while dining at a downtown Seattle restaurant. “I don’t feel Jerry Krause respects me. I don’t feel the organization respects me. After all I’ve done for this organization, they should be happy I’m giving them an opportunity to get something in return because I don’t plan on playing another game for the Chicago Bulls.”

Pippen was unhappy about his contract and understandably so. He was making just $2.7 million in the final year of his contract that season — he was the 122nd highest-paid player in the NBA in 1998 — and he was one of the top 50 players to ever play (I’d say top 25). Pippen was recovering from a foot injury at the time and the team apparently wouldn’t even cover his travel expenses. Bulls general manager Jerry Krause was notoriously cheap, which was partially why this whole “last dance” mantra ever came into existence.

Krause had reportedly tried to trade Pippen that summer for Tracy McGrady, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. I’d love to get some insight as to what made those negotiations fall apart and if Krause actually shopped an unhappy Pippen to other teams at the start of the 1997 season.

4. How much animosity was there between the team and Jerry Krause?

Um, my guess? A lot. How else do explain why one of the best coaches in NBA history was openly saying that 1998 was his last year in Chicago? And the same could be said for Pippen, Jordan and Rodman, all of whom were set to become free agents.

It’s so bizarre to think that a team chasing its 6th title in 8 years had a general manager who was at odds with them. We’re in such a players-first league now that we’d never see that as such a widely accepted concept. That dynasty made the Bulls and yet management had zero desire to keep it together? Strange.

Krause died in 2017, and based on his strong opposition to Sam Smith’s legendary book in the early 90s, The Jordan Rules, my guess is we won’t see a lot of Krause’s side in this. That is, unless there was some unseen interview footage from him. But hopefully former Bulls won’t be afraid to dig into the friction of that relationship just because Krause passed a few years ago.

5. Were there any last-minute conversations to run it back 1 more time?

There had to be, right?

Like, I know the parade and everything brought so much closure, but was there ever a dinner or something when Jordan and Pippen thought about the idea of signing to 2-year deals to finish out the decade?

My guess is no because the upcoming lockout put everything in flux for a bit. But it’s crazy to think that Pippen was only 32 at the time of that deal (that’s how old Steph Curry is now). Sure, they had played a lot of games together and clearly, they were ready for the next chapter. Hence, the title.

Still, I can’t imagine having that much success and having zero last-minute thoughts about trying to extend it as much as possible. The 8-year old version of me needs to know that they at least thought about 1 more year.

6. What are those celebs going to tell us that we don’t already know?

Barack Obama, Justin Timberlake, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Carmen Electra and many, many more … which one of them will tell the story that makes you go “what????” One of them has to. That’s too star-studded of a cast to simply have a bunch of “I idolized that team” quotes. Duh. We want the good stuff.

With all due respect to Magic, but I’m not betting on him to give us the best story (his Twitter game is the softest thing on the internet). New interview footage from the late Bryant is going to be surreal in itself. Hopefully he had some story about a time when Jordan played him 1-on-1 with his left hand and won.

Just getting all of those people to sit down for something like this was a huge hurdle. Here’s hoping we get some never-been-told details from their unique perspectives.

7. What’s the wildest Rodman story that we haven’t heard?

Everyone knows that Rodman was notorious for pulling off all-nighter sessions at the club and somehow putting himself together to hit a weights session the following morning. Jordan says in the preview that during the season if they had a couple days off, they knew they wouldn’t see Rodman for 48 hours.

When Rodman arrived in the 1995-96 season was really when his character took on a new life. The tattoos and the celebrity girlfriends (Madonna, Carmen Electra, etc.) were well-documented. Maybe there was a time when Rodman almost didn’t play in a key playoff game because he was still drunk from the night before? Or perhaps we’re going to learn about him getting into a postgame locker room fight with Pippen. I couldn’t tell you.

Rodman was pretty much an open book so it’s hard to imagine us finding out a bunch of new information about him. The marketing genius surrounding his time almost got more shine than his actual play itself.

Who can’t get enough of The Worm?

8. Did Jordan push off on Bryon Russell?

I know everyone thinks he did, but will we actually get Jordan saying that? That’d be fascinating. I’d love for that to be a part in the doc where they show the 20-some people they interviewed all giving their answer to that question — did Jordan push off Russell to hit that iconic shot to sink the Jazz in 1998?

Actually, I think we can all agree that there was at least some contact. I’d be surprised if anyone said, “nah, Russell just overplayed him to his right.”

All I want is for Jordan to say, “yeah, of course I pushed off. I’m MJ. You really think they’re calling that on me?”

The world needs to hear it from MJ himself.

9. How bad is Jordan going to look?

No, I didn’t ask that question just because of the gambling stuff.

Jordan was hesitant to participate in this documentary. Why? Well, it’s not going to be a puff piece. It’s not going to spin every single angle about Jordan’s leadership as positive. But as we found out from Richard Deitsch’s interview with “Last Dance” director Jason Hehir, Jordan didn’t want a puff piece, nor did he want this to be treated as some hit piece.

He wanted the real story told, and admittedly, it wasn’t the most flattering representation of him. Here’s an excerpt from Deitsch’s column from Hehir explaining how he handled getting Jordan on board.

“The meeting took a little less than an hour. I said to (Jordan), ‘why do you want to do this?’ And he said, ‘I don’t.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘When people see this footage I’m not sure they’re going to be able to understand why I was so intense, why I did the things I did, why I acted the way I acted, and why I said the things I said.’ He said there was a guy named (Bulls teammate) Scotty Burrell who he rode for the entire season and, ‘When you see the footage of it, you’re going to think that I’m a horrible guy.

“But you have to realize that the reason why I was treating him like that is because I needed him to be tough in the playoffs and we’re facing the Indiana’s and Miami’s and New York’s in the Eastern Conference. He needed to be tough and I needed to know that I could count on him.”

Again, this footage followed the entire journey. This isn’t just going to be some championship video (I had ALL of those as a kid). We’re hopefully going to see the side of Jordan that teammates have been telling people about for the past 30 years.

Will our appreciation of Jordan grow? Or will we just decide that his bluntness with teammates and his peers was a product of the times, and that he couldn’t function in the same way today?

I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

10. Did David Stern really tell Jordan to play baseball for a year?

Just kidding. There’s no way we get a definitive answer to that.