As the heat of summer starts to set in, the heat is also on for the Chicago Bulls as they look to recover their playoff form of recent years. The Bulls were a perennial playoff team and Eastern Conference contender under former coach Tom Thibodeau, but under first year head coach Fred Hoiberg, the Bulls were bounced from the playoffs.
The world of professional sports is cruel to losers. Not just teams that feed off the bottom due to a fundamental organizational flaw or complete lack of a competent roster to complete at that level. Losers consist of every team, at every stage of the season, save for the ultimate champion that is crowned at the conclusion of each installment.
In failure, every organization needs to find their way; needs to find meaning and purpose. The Minnesota Timberwolves have suffered through agony for over a decade while their favorite son moved on and claimed a championship elsewhere. They finally look like they are returning to form behind a new wave of young talent and a coach with a proven track record of winning. And while they again struggled in 2015-16, they made massive strides forward, improving by 10 wins over the previous year. This is accepted losing. It is also improvement with the expectation for future success and more winning.
Similar and dissimilar situations exist around the league. The Philadelphia 76ers were the scorn of the league, and still might be. But their abysmal futility over the past few seasons has been with purpose. The Brooklyn Nets are a tragic tale of rich but naïve ownership with expectations that could not be fulfilled. But, they too are seeking to correct the ways of their past. This is life in the lottery.
Chicago Bulls, welcome to The Lottery Mafia.
If this were to be a record of the true failure that has been the Chicago Bulls front office in recent years, particularly last season, it would be a volume so large and damning that they would keep it locked in the Vatican’s secret library. It is the kind of work that if spoken of would see your corpse charred by the dragons of Khaleesi. The subject matter would be that of Kanye West concert tirades in the United Center, explaining the simple truth of where this cycle of destruction started – “We should have never, ever let Michael Jordan go to the Wizards.”
Yeah, it goes back that far. The Bulls have done of a lot of things over the years that reinforce one thing – the belief that their front office precipitated six NBA championships and those championships were won because of front office acumen and not because of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Phil Jackson and the best supporting cast of role players they could muster through the 1990s.
If you don’t understand the Bulls history, I highly recommend Roland Lazenby’s biography of Michael Jordan. It’s about 700 pages longer than what we have here and it is probably better written.
The last time the Bulls missed the playoffs, Barack Obama was not yet President of the United States of America.
In that year (2007-08), Ben Gordon led the team in win shares while only starting 27 games. Kirk Hinrich was, as always, a part of the Bulls at that time. They also had second-year players Thabo Sefolosha and Tyrus Thomas, along with third-year player Luol Deng and rookie Joakim Noah. You might see the picture that is shaping here: the Bulls had talent that was in the ascendency and a few other talented pieces that weren’t around for the long term. Also, it saw the dismissal of Scott Skiles as head coach, ultimately replaced for the remainder of the season by Jim Boylan.
There is a lot of similarity between the roster and coaching situation between that Bulls team and where the team is now.
Chicago has re-entered the lottery, though barely. They are at a crossroads. The Bulls hold the 14th pick in the 2016 draft and have a number of long-term players who are likely on the way out while they look to restructure the team to suit Hoiberg’s offensive structure of movement, movement, movement.
Their story is also more complex than the above referenced teams. They were losers in 2015-16. However, they don’t have Karl-Anthony Towns. They don’t have the Colangelos. They don’t have a big-spending owner and Sean Marks.
They do have: high expectations, a roster full of talent, and a shaky draft history.
It isn’t clear which direction Chicago is headed in 2016-17. They might be heading right back to the playoffs. That 2007-08 failure was a bump in the road. They had been to the Eastern Conference Semifinals the prior year and returned to the playoffs for the following seven seasons before missing again this year. And this team? They were expected to be the biggest threat to the Cleveland Cavaliers before the season began. And they also missed the playoffs altogether the year after making the conference semifinals.
How they do this will be another story, as the Central Division is no slouch. The Milwaukee Bucks, coming off their own down year, have more young talent and should be a threat for a playoff spot. The Detroit Pistons made the playoffs, and there is no reason to think Stan Van Gundy will let them slip out of that spot for the upcoming campaign. The Cavaliers, with or without LeBron, still have Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. That is more than enough to be the class of the Central Division right now. The Pacers might be the weakest of their division opponents with the separation from coach Frank Vogel and little talent to put around Paul George and Myles Turner. And even then, they made the playoffs and forced a first-round Game 7 against the Toronto Raptors, currently battling the Cavaliers in the ECF.
Given the tough competition, the road is going to be hard. And the rest of the East is rounding into form at the same time. It may be lonely at the top for Cleveland, but everyone that falls in behind them is at a similar talent level. The difference between the Hawks and the Celtics or the Heat and Hornets or any of those teams and the Raptors isn’t significant enough to establish a clear second tier in the conference hierarchy. And again, those Bucks. Last season, they fought hard against this Bulls team. Now both are on the outside looking in. And in both cases, you have to believe that it cannot be for long.
Chicago’s biggest problem isn’t going to be their opponent’s roster throughout the season, it is going to be their own.
The front office got into an ugly battle with their last coach and many things surfaced or were emphasized in that process. Among them, the decision to draft Marques Teague over Draymond Green. And then the Bulls elected to trade two picks in the middle of the first round in 2014-15 for the rights to Doug McDermott. The book isn’t shut on McDermott, but as it stands right now in 2016, the Bulls lost in both of those decisions.
Even if you forgive them for their recent draft failures, and I feel for Tony Snell (who seems to be a nice young man with some talent, but lacks confidence and consistency) and the mystery of Cameron Bairstow, you have to begin looking at the transitioning roster. At some point, the Bulls will have to come to terms with their failure to develop these players or acknowledge they don’t have the ability to perform at the NBA level. In with the Hoiberg, out with the Thibodeau.
The similarities between Thibodeau and Hoiberg are that they are both human, speak English and live basketball. I think that is the entire list. Everything else is a departure. The old grinding style of minutes overload and a world-class defense to cover up the barely recognizable offense has little common ground with a desire to play up-tempo offense that always moves and creates but treats defense as more of an afterthought.
Somehow, the same front office that believed they could be eternal champions with or without Michael Jordan also believed that they had constructed the best roster in the East, maybe the league, and that if they changed the coach but didn’t change the players, their approach would work. It didn’t.
And then, most disastrously, they doubled down on their dissonance by hanging on the Spanish ghost of Carlos Boozer, Pau Gasol, and the bloated contract dollars of Joakim Noah. Neither player will be back in 2016-17, unless something goes terribly wrong. And it could because it usually does under the Gar Forman-John Paxson watch in Chicago.
The Bulls paid out the rest of the season to Gasol and Noah instead of moving a player and a contract. Even if the return would have been conditional second-round picks, it would have been better than nothing. And this isn’t even nothing. The speculation continues to swirl around whether Gasol will be brought back at the price he demands. On the other hand, Noah has reportedly told teammates that he is done in Chicago. That’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t even be a discussion right now. Either of them. They should have been gone in February.
But the GarPax union somehow didn’t get that their players weren’t coming back or weren’t working out within the Hoiberg system. Gasol is one of the best cases for why analytics show you things that a standard box score might not. Historically speaking, Gasol did things that few players had ever done before. What he didn’t do was help the Bulls integrate their new coach’s system or contribute in ways that benefited the rest of the team.
Once you go past Gasol and Noah, it doesn’t get any easier. Jimmy Butler had some kind of mental meltdown in 2015-16, which included referring to himself in the third person, publicly criticizing his coach, and constant speculation that he and Derrick Rose want to knife fight each other right in the middle of rush hour on Michigan Avenue while both are strapped with explosives.
Everyone made the logical connection between Butler and both the Boston Celtics and the Wolves, but there is no real reason that Chicago moves on from their current best player who is on a reasonably team-friendly salary. Unless he hari karis his way out. That is, if he alienates both teammates and coach while putting in a full on Richie Tenenbaum-playing-tennis level of effort, he could probably find his way out of town. But even then, the odds that the Bulls want to gift wrap Butler for their former coach whom they clearly carry animus toward are extremely slim. As for Boston, when was the last time Ainge offered up anything valuable? Their top pick this year isn’t enough by itself and no combination of Jared Sullinger and anything else on that roster is ever going to get it done. Or so we would hope.
If they solve the Butler riddle, there is still the question of Rose. Rose probably brings up playing for a new contract again during the preseason, then awkwardly explains that he also doesn’t want to play hard ever again because he doesn’t want sore knees when his son graduates from high school. A reasonable guess – if you played high school, college and then had an extended NBA career riddled with lower body injuries, that sore knee ship sailed when you were about 23. Still, explaining that to Rose probably doesn’t get him to return to insane, lane destroying, drive-and-kick dominance. That ship has also sailed. So what do you do with a talented, former Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player award winner that is entering his “last big contract” stage of his career? Rose isn’t worth it, but the Bulls and half the league will easily have the money for it.
As for the youth on the squad, more questions loom. McDermott is a defensively liability and his scoring only shows up when it wants, not every night when the Bulls need it. Nikola Mirotic is a similar story, though it is unclear if his inconsistency this past season was due to health issues or a sign of something bigger. Bobby Portis should have been a steal late in the first round last year, but with the Bulls, it isn’t clear if he’ll turn into that. Chicago keeps sitting on Taj Gibson, neither trading him or giving him the full starter treatment. His best days may be behind him and he now goes from competing for a starting spot that he might have deserved to standing in the way of the next generation. The idea of trading Gibson could be proposed, but we’ve all seen how GarPax has handled the absolute need to trade away Gasol and Noah.
The language here is strong, but Chicago’s current position necessitates strong language. The team is currently neither here nor there. They need to commit to either fully reworking their roster to suit the modern NBA on offense or they need to revert to the days of Thibodeau. They need to move on from the pieces of the past – Noah, Gasol, Gibson – and make tough decisions about their current stars – Butler, Rose – while implementing what little youth they have available – McDermott, Portis, the 14th pick this year – to combine with the role players or other potential key pieces – Mirotic.
If the Bulls front office takes quick, decisive action this summer, they should be able to return to the playoffs immediately. If they fail to act, or choose to cling to the past, they could very easily pick much higher than 14 in next year’s draft.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
