A picture says 1,000 words about the sorry state of the Chicago Bulls.
The Chicago Bulls are trapped in another nightmare season. Chicago got its ass kicked by the Boston Celtics on Tuesday night, 124-97, to complete a winless run in the inaugural NBA in-season tournament. The Bulls have lost eight of their last nine games, their best player Zach LaVine has requested a trade, and the entire team seems to hate each other. For some reason, management is still reportedly choosing to take a doomed wait-and-see approach following the inevitable LaVine trade.
The only interesting moment of the Bulls’ latest blowout loss came when head coach Billy Donovan complained about Boston’s tactics to ensure a maximum point-differential. Even Celtics players felt bad about it. These are theoretically two of the proudest franchises in the NBA, but one is annually competing for championships while the other just hopes to be mediocre enough that no one really notices them. The Bulls have even failed that lowly mission this year by once again being an all-around civic embarrassment to the great city of Chicago.
A Celtics team photographer captured the Bulls’ sadness in one perfect image just before the end of the first half. As Chicago’s Coby White lost Jaylen Brown on a cut, Brown dunked the ball with LaVine and Patrick Williams looking on in dismay. The look on LaVine’s face says it all.
Credit to the Celtics’ team photographer for getting this image. It’s an instant classic in Bulls apathy.
The Bulls’ downfall this season is a prime example of what happens when your best player quits on the team. LaVine told the Bulls he wants a trade, and since then the team has fallen apart. Of course, the team was destined to collapse anyway; LaVine’s trade request simply greased the wheels.
This year’s unwatchable Bulls product is not all LaVine’s fault — it starts at the very top with Jerry Reinsdorf and his son Michael Reinsdorf. It extends to Chicago’s front office tandem of Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley, and also falls at the feet of Billy Donovan. LaVine and Nikola Vucevic and DeMar DeRozan are all to blame, too, after three years of negative play when sharing the floor together. This team stinks. LaVine is doing them a favor by putting them out of their misery.
Chicago is noticing how bad this product is. The Bulls are currently No. 25 in percentage of attendance. Beyond just being bad, the Bulls also have no hope. Karnisovas traded future draft picks and used up all the team’s cap space to build this horrible team. Young players like Patrick Williams have stagnated. Even if there are a couple teams worse than the Bulls this year — namely, the Pistons and Wizards — any other squad at their level of ineptitude at least has a few good young players on the roster. Chicago has zero.
Karnisovas deserves to be fired, but the Reinsdorfs famously keep all of their executives long after the point where they’ve proven their incompetence. If the Bulls want to stop being an embarrassment, they need to realize a full tear down is required. The loyal Chicago fans will sit through a proper rebuild as long as it is producing hope for the future. This team has none, and there are no shortcut fixes that can save this thing. Trade LaVine, trade DeRozan, trade Alex Caruso. Trade Vucevic, too, if any other team is foolish enough to take on the bloated contract Karnisovas gave him for no reason this summer.
The Bulls have nothing going for them. Even worse, Karnisovas seems totally incapable of grasping the team’s problems and getting them headed to a better future. The Bulls are a disaster once again — not all that different from Reinsdorf’s White Sox. Chicago deserves a lot better than what Jerry and his son have been giving them.
