PHILADELPHIA -- Independence Hall, one of the great symbols of American freedom, stands near Toni Kukoc's new home, an apartment in the central city. It is barely furnished, though it does have a television set to keep Kukoc company.

So it was with some irony that Kukoc pondered a question about whether he felt lonely when he came to the United States for the first time, in 1993, to play for the Bulls, some of whom had mocked the Croatian star for years because of General Manager Jerry Krause's dogged pursuit of him.

"Was I lonely?" Kukoc repeats, a smile widening. "You mean like now?"

After almost seven years with the Bulls, Kukoc was given his liberty last month in a trade to the Philadelphia 76ers. It wasn't something he sought, but he realizes it will be best for his professional life.

"You get into a comfort zone," Kukoc acknowledges. "You have your home, the people around you, your teammates. And then all of a sudden everything changes and you are in an apartment with pretty much nothing there, you have to start your life again. But probably for my basketball career, it is a good change, to play with a competitive team, a team I think is very close to making big things happen, a team that wins games. Yes, I am excited."

Kukoc will make his first appearance back in Chicago Saturday. Meanwhile, his adjustment in Philadelphia is slow, as it was when he joined the Bulls. Kukoc, now a tested veteran instead of an unknown project, is averaging about 10 points and five rebounds on about 10 less shots per game.

"One of our guards," coach Larry Brown says, "happens to dominate the ball a lot."

Of course, Kukoc once had to deal with Michael Jordan, so this is nothing new to him. But Kukoc was supposed to defer to Jordan. He's not supposed to defer to Allen Iverson, who has the same total of collegiate and NBA titles as Darvin Ham has.

"I have to be more aggressive," Kukoc says. "I have to try to put myself in position to score and not try to get everyone involved and then myself like I used to."

In any case, he is looking forward to his return.

"To see my old teammates again, the fans, my family," he says. "Probably things will be, let's say, upside down.. But it will be nice to see the guys again. And the fans were always good to me. I hope they will be Saturday too."

But everyone in Chicago wasn't always good to Kukoc. As an outsider, he didn't get the warmest of welcomes. Toni Kukoc isn't a bitter person, but he does admit he never cared to let anyone get too close.

"I don't think the people in Chicago really knew exactly who I was in the seven years I was there," Kukoc says. "I would say it was my fault, my choice to not allow people to know who I was. Places I went, people I knew, they knew the way Toni Kukoc was as a person and they all treated me great. Everyone else who just read the newspapers and tried to learn about me, I guess I was not that good of a guy."

Kukoc smiles faintly when he says this. He would like to have been more popular. He will not admit to having his feelings hurt when he first came to the Bulls. He doesn't want to acknowledge that kind of emotion. But the 6-foot-11-inch Kukoc clearly retreated from the initial doubts and jealousy of some of his teammates and coaches and the unending mocking in the media.

Few players of such ability ever were treated so harshly upon their arrival, and few ever were reminded more of what they could not do.

In an uncharacteristically candid interview recently, Kukoc talked about his unusual orientation to the Bulls and the NBA, his relationship with Krause, his affection for Scottie Pippen and the way with which coach Phil Jackson and the media dealt with him.

He got off on the wrong foot in the 1992 Olympics when Kukoc, already heavily recruited by Krause after Kukoc was a second-round draft pick in 1990, met the U.S. Dream Team with his Croatian team.

Much has been written about how Pippen, particularly, played tough against Kukoc and noted afterward Kukoc wasn't as good as he expected. What hasn't been elaborated upon was that Kukoc's wife, Renata, was in the hospital back home about to give birth to their first child.

"That first game I was absolutely out of basketball," says Kukoc, who scored four points in that first meeting but had 16 points and nine assists in the rematch in the final. "My wife was in labor. I was calling at halftime. Everything was going on. But after that game I said, 'This is not going to happen again, especially against these guys.'

"They wanted to show me how hard it would be to play in the NBA, so that's how I approached it, Kukoc remembers. "And right away Phil was doing that. In practice, he'd tell Pip and Horace [Grant] to foul me as much as they could and he wouldn't call anything. He wanted to see my reaction, if I would go down or keep playing."

Kukoc decided no one was going to defeat him.

"Sometimes after bad games when I think I should have played much more, I'd go home and say, 'Pack the things and let's go back!' Kukoc says. "I had a great situation for me and my family back home. Money-wise, I was probably the best player in Europe. It was safe where I was in Italy. But I wanted to play in the NBA to see if I could."

"So that would be just for one night. The next morning I would go to practice ready to show I could spend more time on the court and play. Each year I actually proved to everybody and myself I can play and Phil would use me in so many different options."

And he would yell at him in so many timeouts.

"At first I didn't understand," Kukoc says. "I thought a lot and figured the guys gave Phil so many things in the years of championships, just being devoted to them so he'd rather point at me instead of saying something to them. But at some times in critical possessions late in games he'd trust me that much to give me the ball.

"So I found myself thinking on the one hand, 'He's playing me 15 minutes and pulling me in and out to yell at me,' and than at crunch time he's saying, 'OK, give Toni the ball.' One didn't [jibe] with the other at first. After that I figured this thing was to get me mentally prepared to play every game. That's what I believe, not to think he had anything against me or being Jerry's guy.

"I never was anybody's guy," Kukoc says. "I always was myself. Nobody ever asked me. And I know for sure not many journalists were talking to Jerry. They always said Jerry would never trade me because I was his guy. So whoever said that, [Philadelphia] is the proof.

"The thing was, I was the first European guy brought to the Bulls. When you have a team winning championships and there is somebody from Europe and you want him bad on your team, you get into, 'He must love this guy more than Scottie Pippen, more than this one, that one.'

"Here were guys who won championships, and you know what they'd say, 'Yeah, right, some European guy is telling me.' If I was the fifth or sixth guy, it wouldn't be that big a deal."

But it was, and it played out most in the media.

"I would read the papers and they would put things in about me [though] I had never talked to them," Kukoc says, "[writers] I would see in six years maybe five times. 'He can't speak English, from poor Croatia, war country, he can't play defense, can't score, has low self-esteem.' Whatever. Those are not easy things to see.

"I do not say it bothered me that much that it would change my day, especially after [teammates told me] the journalists in Chicago, when you win a championship, they're going write something so it is not boring every day."

So Kukoc adjusted. He says it was John Paxson, B.J. Armstrong and Bill Cartwright who first befriended him, told him not to worry about the yelling, the Jackson-Krause feud and the media. To just play.

And—surprise—it was Pippen who guided him the most.

"He helped me with a sense of basketball, giving you the ball at the right time, helping offensively, defensively, all these little things so you can feel confidence and the flow of basketball," Kukoc says. "I'd have to admit he probably helped me more than anyone in those five or six years."

And Kukoc did his part in those years as well, and perhaps handled it better than anyone imagined.