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.”
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.
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment