The Chicago Bulls Are Still Inept But Are No Longer Doing Funny Espionage Scandals

If you read about or listen to anything involving the broader world of the NBA you will not likely see a lot about the Chicago Bulls.  The Bulls exist in a phantom zone of NBA discourse, seemingly content to win between 35-40 games each season, lose in the Eastern Conference play-in tournament, and endure in a stasis of sub-mediocrity in a league where every other team in their position would be losing games operatically in an attempt to get bailed out by a set of numerical combinations.  

This is nothing new.  The Bulls have been largely bad, incompetently run, and cheap in a nonsensical Reinsdorfian way for most of the twenty-first century,  But under the Arturas Karnisovas/Marc Eversley regime, the Bulls have done something they had never accomplished under their previously bad front office– they are no longer funny.

The John Paxson and Gar Forman Bulls, especially in the years following the dissolution of the Derrick Rose teams, were also bad but at least they were a font of bizarre and stupid scandals.  When they got fired (well technically Paxson was reassigned to an airless tower at the United Center where he is no doubt at work writing a tell-all book excoriating Tom Thibodeau called “Go Ahead and Croak at Me One More Time”), I wrote a post detailing some of the highlights of the never-ending Bulls drama that included accusations of espionage, ("Gar has never come to me and said, 'Hey, Randy, I want you to be a spy in Fred Hoiberg's locker room,'” assistant coach Randy Brown told the Chicago Tribune; Adrian Wojnarowski wrote a column suggesting that Bulls coaches turned on fans because they suspected Forman of listening to their phone conversations and they were forced to work under the John Le Carré Moscow Rules), feuds with star players and coaches, and Paxson allegedly attacking Vinny Del Negro when fighting with him about Joakim Noah’s minutes.

 GarPax, as they became known to angry Bulls fans on the internet, showed a stunning instinct for trying to put together the funniest combination of personalities possible. In 2017, they combined Jimmy Butler, Dwyane Wade, and Rajon Rondo into what the the players called the “Three Alphas,” a name that poetically evoked the exact reason that they would fall apart in the manner of a Greek tragedy.  Their internecine feuds predictably climaxed with Rondo reprimanding his teammates via instagram. Coach Fred Hoiberg, Forman’s hand-picked Thibodeau replacement, attempted to control the situation by making the team watch clips of the Jim Carrey movie “Dumb and Dumber.” 

 

For some reason, I am also under the impression that his motivational tactics also included the Bill Murray vehicle “Meatballs” but can’t find any evidence for it so it is possible that is something I invented to make fun of Fred Hoiberg and now my brain believes it is a fact. For the record, here is a story about Hoiberg making the Bulls watch "Hoosiers"

The Bulls brought in coach Jim Boylen, a man who styled himself after the Aircraft Asshole from Top Gun and so irritated the players that they threatened a wildcat strike and then formed a “leadership council” to deal with him within the first week of his ghastly tenure. He installed a factory-style punch clock in the practice facility.  Within one decade, the Chicago Bulls have installed interim coaches named Jim Boylan and Jim Boylen.

Once or twice a year, Paxson and Forman would deign to meet the media. Paxson, the floppy-haired Finals hero now bald and glowering, Forman bug-eyed with a haircut that resembled the worn down nub of a number two pencil, would give an update on the various feuds and intrigues going on and assure Bulls fans that they knew what they were doing.  Radicalized Bulls fans didn’t buy it. Some of the most deranged and deep-pocketed ones banded together to buy a billboard outside the United Center calling for the duo to be fired; a hometown crowd loudly chanted “Fire Garpax” on a live ESPN set in front of Zach LaVine during the Chicago all-star game that featured zero bulls players.

The Karnisovas/Eversley Bulls have none of that intrigue. They are unbearably boring. The players do not feud publicly.  There have been no accusations of Cold War-style espionage tactics. Neither one has, to my knowledge, attempted to physically assault Billy Donovan or even Billy Donovan III.

The Bulls teams from this era have also been devoid of drama.  The face of the team for many years was Zach LaVine, a person who as far as I can tell has never uttered anything interesting publicly and was only polarizing because of how he plays basketball.  DeMar DeRozan was revered by his teammates for being a good guy.  Even Lonzo Ball, whose entire college and early career was defined by a media circus ringmastered by his insane Basketball Parent father, was a low-key presence even before the injury that kept him out of basketball for years.  Coby White appears to be a ray of sunshine in human form. For a team that has been so consistently bad, the Bulls seemed to be a close-knit group with DeRozan adopting younger players as his “sons” and the jubilant energy of players who knew that only the Chicago Bulls were keeping them from riding busses between Noblesville, Indiana and Oshkosh, Wisconsin or getting road flares fired at them in Macedonia.

For the past several years, the Bulls were defined by their lack of activity.  They simply refused to trade players.  In a league that is now dominated by transactions, this Bartleby-style inertia destroyed the minds of trade-pilled basketbloggers.  They just kept sending the same doomed team out there to die in the play-in at the hands of the Miami Heat. And then, when they finally did start to make some moves, they were all completely out of step with anything any other team was doing.  They refused to deal in the NBA’s preferred currency of draft picks and instead insisted on old-fashioned player-for-player swaps. They handed the Thunder the trophy by giving them defensive superstar Alex Caruso for maddening Australian enigma Josh Giddey and nothing else. They finally traded Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan for a bunch of bench flotsam and unloaded a miraculously resurrected Lonzo Ball for a lesser role player, albeit one whose knees are not yet experimental.

This front office operates with a weird set of fixations.  They love local players, and the bench tends to be filled out with former Illinois residents who might be old enough to remember Derrick Rose.  They prefer to draft long, athletic, teenaged wing players who do not know how to play basketball; when Matas Buzelis, a spindly 6’10” player whose parents are from Karnisvoas’s native Lithuania, grew up in suburban Hinsdale, and who demonstrated a very shaky shooting stroke in the G League fell to them in the draft, it was impossible for them to not pick him.  Unlike most of the players the Bulls have drafted who mainly excel at dribbling the ball off their own feet longly and athletically, it seems like Buzelis might have a shot to be decent.

This year, after trading for their draft pick, the Bulls went back to the well, selecting gangly French teenager Noa Essengue.  Essengue is so young that the sky is the limit with him, but on the other hand it will likely take him several years to be able to play NBA basketball. To me it seems unlikely the Bulls are going to be able to turn him into Giannis Antetokounmpo or Pascal Siakam, and it seems more likely that they have selected someone closer to the Bruno Caboclo side of the spectrum. In a related story, the Bulls have inexplicably fired their player development guru/shooting coach this offseason who seemed to have success helping some players shoot.  Under the previous regime when a someone was fired for reasons that only make sense as spite or personal animus, we’d at least get a sourced up leak about how they had been feuding with the front office for years and that Gar Forman had sent one of his lamplighters disguised as a Geek Squad member to install devices around their house for Forman to listen in on from a Bannockburn safe house, but now we just get a press release.
  
Essengue attracted some minor controversy before the draft by bailing on his German team playing the league’s finals in order to attend the draft.  On the one hand, it is funny that the NBA draft has become a large enough television production that someone would want to be a part of it when the ceremony itself consists of nervously sitting at a banquet table in a suit that will seem either comically large or small to future fashion analysts and an experience that culminates with a dead fish handshake from Adam Silver.  On the other hand, and forgive me if this is a curmudgeon take, it seems like a kind of crummy thing to do to your teammates who are still trying to win a title. Essengue would still get to be in the NBA and make all of that money and only lost the gift of listening to Jay Bilas describe his Elite Motionality or whatever for ten minutes. Someone should have told him that as a Chicago Bull, that Bundesliga Finals will be the closest he will get to playing for a championship until he is mercifully sent to another team.

THEY DRAFTED A NORTHWESTERN GUY

In the weeks leading up to the draft, I began to see a strange and interesting pattern when looking at second-round draft projections: the words “Northwestern University.”  Some draft analysts had become enamored with the Wildcats’ do-it-all stopper Brooks Barnhizer, even after his college career ended sadly in a walking boot and predicted he could get selected in the actual NBA draft.

In my mind, I found it hard to believe he would get drafted.  Northwestern has had a number of very good college players on the team fail to make it to the NBA because of various flaws– too short, not quite athletic enough, extremely effective jump shot in college looks like a malfunctioning oil derrick, etc.-- and making the NBA is extremely difficult even for good players. Anyone who watched Barnhizer knew about his defense, passing, and complete disregard for his own dental integrity when flinging himself around the basketball court, but he is a four-year college player and not the type of gangly, athletic mutant that is the cutting edge for NBA prospects. I was prepared to spend a month furiously demanding that the Bulls put him on their summer league team after they had deeply betrayed me last year by selecting Illinois’s Marcus Domask over Boo Buie as their token Local Summer League Guy.

Official Northwestern graphic after Barnhizer got drafted. They chose to do this.

Barnhizer is the first Northwestern player to get drafted since Evan Eschmeyer was selected in the second round in 1999.  It is no longer rare to see Northwestern players in summer league and in the G League (Barnhizer could end up teaming with former Wildcat-turned-Hoosier Miller Kopp on the ridiculously-named OKC Blue).  But Pat Spencer (who once played lacosse by the way) cracked an NBA playoff rotation.  Veronica Burton, finally given big minutes on an expansion team, is tearing it up for the Valkyries. This could be a golden age of Wildcats in pro basketball.

The path is tough for Barnhizer to make it in the NBA.  He joins the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder, an extremely good and deep team that offers little to no playing time for prospects. On the other hand, the Thunder are also adept at turning second-rounders and undrafted players into cogs in their suffocating defensive machine, and the NBA’s financial environment means that there will be a lot of churn at the bottom and middle of their roster in coming years, so you never know. Perhaps one of these days we will see a toothless Barnhizer bleeding onto the Larry O’Brien trophy.

PLEASE DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT AN “APRON”

One of the major topics of conversation around the finals was the appalling state of mainstream NBA discourse.  This discussion usually coalesced around ESPN’s unbearable playoff coverage, centering a glowering Stephen A. Smith standing on screen and bobbing up and down like a Street Fighter character before telling us that the INDIANA PACERS will REGRET having TYRESE HALLIBURTON turn his achilles tendon into a BOWL OF SPAGHETTI on live television.  In my OPINION he SHOULD NOT. Have DONE THAT. ESPN’s halftime show features Kendrick Perkins whose job is to challenge every NBA player to a fistfight, Bob Meyers who is either wearing the league’s most elaborate hairpiece since the days of Marv Albert or is paying tens of thousands of dollars annually to have his hair styled like an ushanka made out of hair from 1970s game show hosts, and put-upon wrangler Malika Andrews. In the brief sixty to ninety second windows that they are allowed to speak between commercials, they present to NBA fans watching an NBA game, a verbal assault against the NBA.

 

If it were me, I would not have THROWN the SHO-RYUKEN. It is TOO COMPLICATED to be able to hit all of those BUTTONS on the SEGA GENESIS

But for me, there is a far more deranging and annoying mode of NBA discourse and that is the complete collapse of NBA talk into financial terms.  This is not new; any league with a salary cap becomes a Contracts League once salary management becomes integral to team building strategy, but the NBA salary cap is so baroque that its maneuverings have overrun basketball discussion.

The latest NBA collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ union that sets up the league’s transaction rules has made financial talk unavoidable.  It imposes heavy penalties for teams that spend beyond some arbitrary limit that are not just additional taxes but severe restrictions that limit how teams above it can structure deals that make it difficult, if not functionally impossible, to move players.  

These new, stringent penalties have had a disastrous effect for fans who want to know what teams are doing or why good teams are so eager to jettison useful players: they have made salary cap discourse vital to league strategy. If salary cap penalties like those that previously existed in the NBA (more or less) or currently exist in MLB are mostly financial sanctions, it is very easy to dismiss any cap-cutting moves as the owner being a cheap scumbag. I should not have to worry about whether a guy is "overpaid;" if the Bulls want to give 150 million of Jerry Reinsdorf’s American dollars to fucking Josh Giddey of all people, that should be funny and not something I have to worry about because it will make it impossible for the Bulls to be good beyond the tragic state of “being the Chicago Bulls.”  But under this new CBA, owners have created actual consequences for team-building beyond their own pocketbooks so fans are encouraged to root for teams successfully lowballing players or getting mad when good players are paid a lot of money.  When teams cut costs around the cap they are not only being cheap scumbags but are now considered smart in a way that pleases the basketball savverati that I find particularly annoying.

The new cap also has imposed an intolerable rhetorical assault on sports fans by referring to the salary cap penalty thresholds as “aprons.” This is disgusting.  The NBA is a sports league, and there is no reason why they couldn’t use normal sports-inflected terms here: a “penalty zone” or a “salary limit,” which would still be irritating but at least clear.  Instead, any time I want to know why, for example, backup center Jonas Valanciunas has become a league-bearing linchpin controlling the fate of several teams’ offseason deals, I am confronted with the term “second apron,” which no person without an MBA would ever use except in a specific situation involving a neighbor coming over to help cook.  It is part of the increasing intrusion of an off-putting business argot that has crept into the NBA and lingers around transactions along with “trade kicker,” “cap hold,” and the odious but now sadly ubiquitous “asset.”  

I suppose it is my own fault for subjecting myself to this type of talk, but it is more frustrating that a vague understanding of the league’s financial arcana has become more necessary than ever to try to follow the NBA offseason. The league has focused more than ever on transactions and player movement and then has the nerve to spring “apron” on us.  Fortunately, there is one small saving grace for the incursion of Apron Talk into the lexicon of NBA terminology: the Bulls will never be anywhere near it.

The NFL Has Been Very Unfair to Our Beautiful Quarterbacks

The idea of attending an NFL draft seems like one of the most nightmarish sports-associated experiences a person could have. I can’t imagine spending hours on my feet listening to Roger Goodell bleat out 70% of a teleprompted sentence, waiting in a 45 minute line for a porta potty, or weathering the threat of getting accidentally getting bonked in the head by a ferula wielded by someone dressed as the Arizona Cardinals Pope who is in a drunken shoving match with someone dressed as the St. Louis Rams Hulk while a band blasts a saxophone-heavy cover of Lose Yourself. The fact that the draft was held this year at the hellmouth of Lambeau Field only made the entire enterprise seem even more unbearable.

And yet, the NFL draft maintains a mysterious and embarrassing hold over me. Every year I write about how stupid and ridiculous the draft is and every year I let the entire thing wash over me like a Lake Michigan wave on a water quality alert day. I am not a Draft Guy either– I don’t pore over mock drafts or look at highlights or listen to draft podcasts, and I’ve never heard of most of the players even in the first round unless they are Big Ten guys who I watched obliterate hapless Northwestern players. I have absolutely no idea how nor any interest in figuring out whether a good college player will turn out to be as a pro by looking at his Sudden Jumpability or Elite Pad Placement, or any of the other bullshit that NFL draft analysts spend all year inventing to say that a guy is big, strong, or fast except with the stilted argot of a police report. I also have no patience for the manipulation of “draft capital” and “value.”

What I love about the NFL draft and what will keep me watching is that I am addicted to the production. It will never stop being funny to me that the stentorian goofballs who treat the NFL like it is a branch of the United States armed forces and not a sport where enormous people run into each other and then do crotch pumps have been put in charge of putting on an NFL fan convention. Every decision is baffling to me. The new innovation this year was putting players waiting for their names to be called in little patches of fake yard and then having them walk down a hallway that was long enough to be a Get Smart sight gag– I was mildly disappointed that no draftees decided to run down the hallway, fall down, and start clutching their knee as a bit. I also enjoy rubbernecking the crowd who are drunkenly booing the concept of the New York Jets while a person wearing a necklace featuring a New York Jets fan license plate looks on with the pained vaudeville expression of a professional wrestler hearing his rival’s theme song; this is the same way I enjoy the local TV station that for some reason broadcasts the New Year’s Eve celebration at the Rosemont Hilton every year to delight Chicagoland audiences with the swaying grandees of the northwest suburbs. I also really like the ESPN the pick is in noise.

This year’s draft featured a slightly less psychotic presentation than years past: there were no orangutans manipulating ipads or circus performers getting stuffed into a barrel while NFL films music blared over highlights over a linebacker from the University of Utah. The most exciting thing happening other than a band that I would describe as charmingly wedding-adjacent playing the hits of 2003 was that they kept cutting to fans from sites of international games and I got to hear a French person say the word “linebacker.” But they did not need any of that because ESPN and the NFL got handed a Major Draft Narrative.

This year, the entire draft centered on the fall of Colorado quarterback prospect Shedeur Sanders from a consensus that had him getting picked late in the first round in that zone where quarterback-desperate teams eventually lose their minds and trade up for an obvious bust– this time it was the Giants hoisting themselves back into the first to grab Arnold Schwarzenegger Pronunciation Icon Jaxson Dart– to the fifth round, where he was picked by the perennially disastrous Cleveland Browns.

The Sanders fall, which also involved the dullard son of the Atlanta Falcons defensive coordinator trying to hoodwink him with a ponderous prank call, became the main topic of the draft as analysts tried to explain why teams continued to pass on Sanders. As this happened, sourced-up reporters began to leak vague details of Sanders’s lousy attitude in interviews, his substandard “board work” whatever that means, and his unwillingness to participate in predraft workouts and bowl games in a way that reminded me of the plot point in the deranged Kevin Kostner movie “Draft Day” where he declines to pick a quarterback because of Character Concerns after learning that his teammates did not go to his birthday party.


One of the funniest examples of Hollywood Ball Knowing Failure is that in the movie draft day the projected number one quarterback is coming from the University of Wisconsin

But the issue that loomed largest for Sanders was his existence within the greater Deion Sanders media ecosystem. Any team that drafted Sanders risked invoking the ire of his father, who has a red hotline-style phone that goes to live on air to every braindead ESPN Yak Show. To NFL teams, Sanders’s “off-field” issues threatened coaches and executives with something much worse than players who have been accused of things far more odious than having a pain-in-the-ass celebrity father– the ability to potentially get them fired from their phoney-baloney jobs.

Mel Kiper, Jr, spent the entire draft in an extended meltdown over the Sanders fall after he had him listed in his top five. Kiper, whose famous hair has been engaging in a years-long retreat to higher ground on his scalp so it now looks like he is wearing a greased Magneto helmet, railed against the NFL as ignorant about the Quarterback Position. He fumed. He ranted. He whined about how the National Football League was being very unfair to Sanders, very unfair and in fact it’s a disgrace in the now-ubiquitous cadence of every aggrieved septuagenarian television creature that is the sole cultural legacy of the president of the United States.

Kiper’s deranged three day long psychotic break on ESPN’s draft presentation raised the question of what he is even doing there. I don’t think anyone even in the very silly world of Draft Knowers takes anything he says seriously and his own jeremiad against the NFL’s ability to evaluate quarterbacks instantly brings reminders of the times he has stuck his neck out for some of the funniest draft busts imaginable. Kiper remains on ESPN television as an NFL Draft mascot, a sort football muppet who can instantly talk about a college player’s Motorability or Jump Rate for five minutes without blinking, so it is very funny when he throws a nuclear tantrum about how the NFL is being very unfair to our beautiful quarterbacks for what is like six cumulative hours or television.

Every year after the draft, Mel Kiper is admitted to a clinic for removing all of the moths and flies that have flown directly into his mouth and are trapped in his body in a painful seven hour procedure

The Chicago Bears used their first three picks on a tight end, a wide receiver, and an offensive lineman. These players will reinforce a coterie of new offensive linemen hired from free agency and the Bears’ new head coach, who has a reputation as an offensive mastermind. The changes from the Bears have led some pundits who think that you can use rational thought to analyze the Chicago Bears to believe that Ben Johnson and these new players along with lauded quarterback Caleb Williams can lead to them having a functional and coherent offense. I disagree.  My contention is that they are the Chicago Bears and are doomed to have a sisyphusian Bears-style offense that depends on fumble returns from linebackers for eternity or at least until the National Football League is banned either for either being a brutal death sport or for not being fascist enough for the United States government in the near future.

I DON’T WANT TO ALARM YOU BUT THERE’S A NORTHWESTERN GUY IN THE LITERAL NBA PLAYOFFS

Something crazy happened when I tuned into the NBA’s All-Star Saturday Night program to watch spindly car wash inflatable Matas Buzelis represent the Bulls in the rookie/sophomore tournament. Former Northwestern guard Pat Spencer, the Man who Once Played Lacrosse himself, showed up in the same tournament as a member of the Santa Cruz Warriors. Northwestern sort of had a player in the NBA.

The Wildcats have not had consistent representation in the NBA since Evan Eschmeyer got drafted by the New Jersey Nets. A few players have appeared here and there: Reggie Hearn got a few minutes for the Pistons, Vic Law played for the Magic in the Disney Bubble, Scottie Lindsay and Chase Audige have been floating around in the G League, and Boo Buie briefly held a two-way contract with the Knicks but has not yet made it to the Association. But there was Spencer in a vaguely All-Star-adjacent event for a national audience.

I am pretty surprised that of all the players to pass through Welsh-Ryan in the decade or so that Northwestern has fielded a few pretty decent teams that the guy I am now watching in the NBA is Pat Spencer. To be honest, I had sort of forgotten about Spencer, who had led Northwestern through a single, forgettable eight-win season. Spencer was a novelty, a guy who was surprisingly good for someone who did not play college basketball at any level before being flung into the Big Ten meat grinder but probably would not start for any Big Ten team other than Northwestern. Spencer’s 2019-20 team features a lot of players who would eventually be pretty good– Boo Buie, Pete Nance, Robbie Beran, and Miller Kopp were all on the team, but they were all freshmen (except sophomore Nance) and needed some time to develop into the bones of the teams that would eventually make the NCAA Tournament. Buie showed some early signs by going off for 26 in a loss to Michigan State; it would not be until the next season when Boo Buie would begin regularly torturing Tom Izzo into a sputtering beet-red reverie.

 

Pat Spencer is the only person in the world who has played with basketball legends Boo Buie and Stephen Curry

Spencer eventually joined the Warriors and I started seeing him in occasional garbage time in actual NBA games. But I had not noticed that he had made the Warriors roster until I started to see him appear in playoff games as part of Steve Kerr’s desperately expanding rotations. Spencer was materializing in competitive minutes. He was on the court with Steph Curry. He was getting screamed at as he was frog-marched by security off the court at the Toyota Center for throwing a light NBA-style headbutt at Rockets center Alperen Sengun.

It has been very funny to see the reaction on the internet to Pat Spencer. Spencer, who now sports a Performance T-shirt under his jersey and for some reason a combination of stubble and bushy mustache that makes him look like a nineteenth-century saloon keeper, has been running around and scoring buckets using a clumsy looking jump hook, leading to a lot of social media comments perplexed by his entire deal and characterizing him as a pickup player. He wears number 61. The announcers have been working overtime talking about his storied lacrosse career every time he is on the court. 

Pat Spencer has shown his barber a picture of a guy ducking under the bar as soon as the piano player starts hitting diminished chords

Northwestern’s NBA footprint remains minimal. The ‘Cats have not had a player drafted in the twenty-first century, and they have not had a player who has been an NBA regular since Billy McKinney in the early 1980s (Rex Walters also had a meaningful NBA career in the 1990s, but he transferred to Kansas for his last two seasons, so I am not sure how he fits as a Canonical Wildcat because I had absolutely no awareness about the existence of Northwestern basketball when he played). I am not sure I would have picked Pat Spencer as the first Northwestern player attracting any sort of attention as an NBA player in 20 years, but perhaps a mustachioed Jud Buechler-style bench guy whose most interesting attribute is the fact that he did not play basketball is the most accurate representation of Wildcat men's basketball to the broader world.

THE CUBS ARE GOOD AND FUN AND ARE DESPERATELY HOPING THAT YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT THE MONEY YET

The Chicago Cubs made a trade in December for the best player they’ve rostered since Kris Bryant won an MVP, and then they went into the season with some of the worst vibes imaginable. This is because every year around the annual Cubs convention Tom Ricketts decides tp put on a barrel with suspenders and go on the radio to lecture fans about how he and his billionaire family are boiling and eating shoelaces in the hopes of affording another 35 year old utility guy on a minor league deal. Ricketts was lambasted by the national media about this– to the extent that the Cubs have come up in conversation at all in the last few years of their metronome-like 83-win finishes it was every media member involved with major league baseball mocking the Cubs for not spending money.

Starting in 2015, after the Cubs finished the teardown that saw them become unbearably bad and cheap as part of Theo Epstein’s rebuilding plan, the Ricketts family started to spend big money. The Cubs took advantage of the fact that their core players were all young and cheap and spent at the top of the free agent market. It seemed for a few years that if the Cubs wanted a guy, they got him, luring top players like Jon Lester, Ben Zobrist, Yu Darvish, and Jason Heyward. They had joined the Red Sox and the Yankees as a Serious Big Market Team. Then, after 2019, they stopped. They traded Yu Darvish for a group of teenagers, let beloved slugger Kyle Schwarber leave, and began unloading the world series players and bringing in unknowns who were distinguished mainly by the paucity of their paychecks. This was during the partial pandemic shutdown, when Ricketts began squawking about “biblical losses” and people started appearing in Cubs uniforms with names like “The Romine Brothers” and “Johneshwy Fargas” like barnstormers from far-flung AAA teams.

The Cubs gave up a lot to get Tucker including phenom Cam Smith, third baseman Isaac Paredes, and Hayden Wesneski who is the best pitcher I have ever seen at bellowing FUUUUUCKKK after giving up a massive dinger, but it has already paid off. Tucker looks like an MVP candidate and gives the Cubs a hitter that teams are afraid of. But the conversation around Tucker in Chicago is dominated by money. He is a free agent after this season, and it looks like he could command nearly a half billion dollars in his next contract. The Cubs under Jed Hoyer, whose own record in free agency is largely throwing up his hands and  saying “too rich for my blood” while loading up on washed up veterans on low-cost contracts who end up getting released three months into the season, have not come close to looking like they are willing to pay it. For some reason, the Cubs had to play the Dodgers seemingly once a week for the first month of the season, and it almost felt like Tucker would at some point in the middle innings start wearing a Dodgers uniform. Almost no one believes the Cubs are willing to pay Tucker whether they work out an extension before the season or if Tucker enters the free agency market. The Cubs seem no longer to be in the superstar business.

It is impossible to tell what Tucker is thinking. I have watched a fair amount of Tucker interviews from the time the Cubs traded for him and even for a baseball player he seems devoid of personality. Tucker insists that behind the scenes he is capable of having a conversation; ESPN had to run an entire article about it where Tucker goes on record to claim that he is "decently outgoing." I don’t blame anyone in the spotlight who chooses to go about their business wearing the armor of cliches and nonanswers, and if Tucker doesn't want to ever say anything interesting into a microphone, that's his prerogative. And in that way, Tucker fits in with the rest of the Cubs, an outfit that seems to prioritize bland players. The team right now has about three guys who seem to have any discernible personality, and two of them speak to the media exclusively through translators. But even in this beige, staid bunch Tucker stands out. I love having Tucker on the Cubs and I will be elated if the Ricketts family somehow decides to dip into their billions to pay him and maybe even the dreaded Luxury Tax. But this dude makes Nico Hoerner look like Rickey Henderson.

Kyle Tucker, pictured having the best time of his entire life

The Cubs have been very fun this season. Tucker has been amazing, Suzuki is knocking the crap out of the ball, Pete Crow-Armstrong looks like a superstar and the most fun Cubs player since prime Javy Baez. They are stealing a million bases. Their veteran backup catcher is inexplicably putting up small sample Barry Bonds numbers. Their bullpen is horrendous, and they have somehow had to comeback from down ten runs repeatedly, the already shallow rotation has lost its two best pitchers, including having ace Justin Steele out for the season, and third base remains a black hole. But for now they are fun and I guess we will have to wait for the offseason to see how content with mediocrity the Ricketts family is willing to remain.

The Big Ten's Own Rules Could Not Prevent More Northwestern Basketball

 

After a series of injuries and ridiculous, hard luck finishes torpedoed Northwestern's men's basketball season they have managed to wash up on the shores of the first round of the Big Ten Tournament. This is a new indignity for Big Ten basketball fans. Until Kevin Warren got on a horse and wandered the West rounding up sports programs, it was the solemn and dignified right of every Big Ten team no matter how bad to get to go to the conference tournament and get to play at least one game, even if it is getting blown out in a sad afternoon spectacle. Now, the conference is so unwieldy that teams have to qualify for it, with the three worst teams eighty-sixed into a cold Midwestern alley with a series of byzantine tie breakers serving as a bouncer. 

There is a certain romance to a conference tournament that promises teams that no matter how lousy they have been in the season they still had a chance to enter the NCAA Tournament by going on an insane run.  For small conferences, this is a lifeline; I immediately thought about Bill Carmody's Holy Cross team making a run in the Patriot League tournament to somehow end up playing in the First Four. In the Big Ten, the fabled conference tournament run is more myth than reality. I cannot remember a single team winning the Big Ten Tournament that would not have otherwise qualified for the NCAAs.  Very few bad Big Ten teams have had particularly memorable runs.  But then again the entire brand of March Madness is the fact that the sport stacks an enormous number of advantages for larger programs that should make it functionally impossible for any smaller programs to beat them and then allow a crew of misshapen, headbanded, mustachioed March Madness Oafs the opportunity to try. 

This season was bound to be a hangover after the glory of Boo Buie's two senior years, years in which Northwestern made the NCAA tournament easily, repeatedly vanquished Illinois and Indiana, and upset the number one team at home twice in the same calendar year against the best player in college basketball who was a literal giant.  Buie gave Northwestern a player they've never had before, a bona fide star who other teams feared and a throwback player who needed four years to turn into a supernova.  

But even without Buie, the Wildcats returned a seasoned, veteran team that had battled through the Big Ten twice.  They played tough defense.  They limited their own turnovers.  And they are largely a team of older players who could play a physical shove-based basketball, willing to take advantage of the Big Ten's blood combat referees if that meant they could beat up on teams stocked with younger, more promising players.  This was a team with Matt Nicholson who appears to have just gotten finished putting a bear in a full nelson and is wearing its fur on his face and Brooks Barnhizer, who routinely finished games without all of the teeth and blood he started with.  In their first conference game, the 'Cats took a well-regarded but young and transfer-heavy Illinois team to overtime hell at Welsh-Ryan (this Northwestern team loves overtime) and won.

The plan was for Barnhizer to take over the team this season.  Barnhizer emerged last year as Buie's do-it-all sidekick who could play defense, grab rebounds, hit his signature mid-range fadeaway, handle the ball, and never leave the court.  Barnhizer already hit a legacy shot, the running layup to send last year's first-round tournament game to overtime, overcoming the adversity of having the CBS television commentators repeatedly make fun of his burgeoning mustache.

The surprise of the season, though, has been the emergence of Nick Martinelli who came out of nowhere to lead the Big Ten in scoring and minutes and who has become one of the most delightful pain-in-the ass players this team has ever produced. Martinelli is big and strong but also has a surprisingly deft touch around the basket and is left-handed; the result is that he scores with an array of clumsy-looking jump hooks, scoop shots, Rube Goldberg-style bank shots, and the occasional three to keep them honest that seems to me like the most annoying arsenal of shots that can be mustered by an opposing player. As Martinelli gained more and more playing time last season after a plague of injuries left large chunks of the Wildcats' starting rotation forced to watch games in casts and wheely scooters, commentators just kept pointing out that he was just going to go to his left-handed hook and everyone knew it, but modern players do not train against elderly men at the Y and were powerless to stop his musty, wood-paneled 1970s rec room game. 

This year, Martinelli turned into an unstoppable scoring machine, becoming a devastating clean-up man around the rim, playing physical defense, and becoming a deadly clutch scorer. He finished off USC and a very good Maryland team with last-second game winners at Welsh-Ryan.

Martinelli embodies the fun of college basketball.  A lot of NBA purists hate the college game because the difference in skill, athleticism, and tactics make it practically another sport.  On the other hand, college basketball is delightfully more weird.  There is no one in the optimized, pace-and-space NBA who plays like Nick Martinelli.  College basketball is still the place where jump hook specialists and prematurely balding goggle guys and centers whose skill is just being absolutely enormous can thrive.  There are simply not enough athletic freaks walking the Earth to remake college basketball in the NBA's image.  This is not a value judgement or saying that the college game is more "pure" or whatever-- if a state-of-the art one-and-done NBA draft pick guy decided for some reason to come to Northwestern I would be thrilled-- it is just a fact that whenever Northwestern has a good player, his game is probably going to be a little weird because otherwise he probably wouldn't be here.

Even at full strength, Northwestern's hopes of returning to the tournament this season had dwindled as the 'Cats sank into the meat of the Big Ten schedule.  They lost some heartbreaking games, most notably a on an absolute prayer launched with .8 seconds left in Iowa City, and also some stinkers to teams they probably should have beaten.  Then, another plague of injuries.  Barnhizer eventually could not longer try to play high-level basketball on a broken foot, as Chris Collins announced through tears. Jalen Leach, a grad-transfer scoring guard, tore his ACL soon after. The 'Cats lost two of their top three scorers, neither of whom will ever suite up in purple again. A gutted and discombobulated team then faltered on a depressing West coast road trip.  

Despite the heartbreak, Nicky Jump Hooks has managed to lead the Wildcats into the first conference tournament where the Big Ten could have legally prevented more Northwestern basketball.  They do not want to make it that easy to watch.  The first-round games are banished to the Peacock streaming service as part of the Big Ten's wretched new media deal.  The Big Ten's media empire draws its power from the simple promise that by getting your TV provider to carry its service you can watch all of your team's games, even the shitty ones that would never be on TV before. Instead, the games have now been farmed out to a patchwork of networks and streaming services-- one thing that I fully believe is that if a person is willing to spend their time watching a Northwestern-Penn State basketball game, that person should be allowed to do so even if they must also be put on a list.  The teams playing in the first round of the tournament are playing for the chance for fans to actually see them on television in the next round.  On the other hand, listening to a Northwestern Big Ten Tournament game on the radio during working hours is an important ritual in its own right.

There's no tanking in college basketball. If a team's top players get injured and the season falls apart, that's that. There's no draft picks or incentive for being bad. Players out of eligibility are done, either facing a fraught and uncertain world professional basketball in remote corners of the world or getting a job outside the game.  The program moves on without them.  This happens in the NBA too but no one really gives a shit about the fungible, fringe players on tanking rosters who are then recycled throughout the league as contract values or G-League bodies.  Each season is a college basketball team's last.  Every game in the conference tournament or maybe in the NIT or one of those fly-by-nite fake tournaments-- for example, there's the one Fox is pushing called "The Crown" where they keep putting graphics on teams in "The Crown" like it is something that already exists and people know about and does not exist in the fevered imagination of some Fox executive who assumes there are people in a sports bar saying hey who do you think is ending up in "The Crown" this season-- represents a chance to keep playing one last game.

It's been a rough season for Northwestern basketball.  And yet here I am eyeing their side of the bracket thinking they might be able to beat Minnesota again and then who knows maybe steal another one. The Big Ten tournament regularly crushes any hope of the bottom teams advancing like a fleet of monster trucks rolling through a pile of old sedans. But it's March basketball and I'm going to embrace the power of hope, embrace the power of bullshit third-tier postseason tournament berths, and, most importantly, embrace the power of the left-handed jump hook.