Anyone who is a fan of the NBA needs to hold two rotten truths in their head at the same time: that about a third of the teams in the league are desperately trying to lose, and that intentional losing for the sake of draft position is an effective strategy that teams need to embrace to their own detriment. This stinks! It is not uncommon for rules structures in professional sports allow for optimized strategies that make it crappy to watch or follow a league. Anyway, the Bulls have decided after several years of mediocrity that they are going to be intentionally very crappy by trading away their best players and getting a ton of guards on the team and marginal draft picks, and everyone is mad about it.
Arturas Karnosivas with a classic "actually we did not make mistakes" post-deadline zoom press conference. There needs to be a service that trains people who have to appear on televised broadcast calls how not to look like they are scolding John Hammond for not having dinosaurs on their dinosaur tour.
I am going to take out an extremely unorthodox and contrarian position here and say that it would have been sort of cool for the Bulls to succeed at whatever they were doing. Whatever the manifold flaws of their roster and their repeated commitment of the cardinal sin of the savvy NBA Watcher by paying good players too much money, they were trying very hard to win. They would not trade away players for draft picks or intentionally try to lose games, or take on bad contracts. In fact, for several years, they barely did any transactions at all, which infuriated the trade-mongering NBA podcast people who hunger for "smart pieces of business" to "get under the second apron." Man, these are not phrases I want to hear in any part of sports.
Instead, the Bulls were run as a complete repudiation of the podcasteratti who live to denigrate the "treadmill of mediocrity" and call for every team that is going to win fewer than 55 games to "blow it up." Nothing for them is smarter than making a team intentionally worse so it can collect "assets." I would like to find the person who is responsible for introducing the word "assets" into American sports lexicon and banish them to some sort of minimum security business school. The Bulls refused to do any of that shit and just tried to win with the same kind of mediocre players every year and were rewarded for this heroic stance against annoying Sloan-style groupthink by getting whomped by the fucking Heat every year in the play-in tournament and being the laughingstock of the league.
Of course, this could not work for the Bulls because they are owned by a cheap gremlin who has a large chunk of the city's sports fans in an anguished headlock and are run by fools and sycophants. The Bulls stink. It of course would have probably been better to get rid of Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan and Alex Caruso and Nikola Vucevic and anyone else who any other team was willing to take as soon as possible for the best picks and also traded for bad basketball players on bad longterm conracts for more picks and tried to lose as many games as possible in the hopes that the draft lottery (which has repeatedly rewarded "Bulls-style" teams with top picks by the way) would give them a superstar. One of the many indignities about being a fan of the Bulls is having to admit that the podcast dorks are right.
So instead of drifting through another trade deadline and then holding a somnambulent press conference where reporters delicately ask him "Arturas, everyone says everything you are doing is stupid. Can you talk about that?" and responding "Actually I think we are not stupid" Karnisovas held a manic 72-hour tradeathon.
His first move was the type of financial bullshit transaction that have become de rigeur in the NBA. He took on Dario Saric, an unplayable oaf who is on his way back to Eurobasket, for some second-round picks. He also took on second round picks for Ayo Dosunmu, Coby White, and Nikola Vucevic. The Bulls acquired eight second round picks at the deadline (it was originally nine but they lost one because of a Coby White injury; the Bulls had him play 30 minutes on an injured calf the night before they traded him because they had like six other players available).
Second round draft picks are largely worthless. The odds of finding a star in the second round are tiny; it is somewhat possible to find a contributor there because this is the place where older college players who know how to play basketball but are smaller or slower than the NBA ideal have been banished in recent years, but still rare. For some reason, though, slews of second round picks have become currency in the NBA, I suspect, because most of the good teams have already used up all of their first round picks and teams need to trade something. Second round picks are a sort of bizarre NBA fiat currency. These trades, along with teams maneuvering contracts around to get under various "aprons" (disgusting term) have made following the NBA more like analyzing complex financial markets instead of a sport where a guy at the bleeding edge of human physical ability jumps over another guy and throws a basketball at his face through a hoop and then yells "AAAHHHH."
Here's the ledger for the Bulls: Out is Coby White, a human ray of sunshine who is one of the few recent Bulls draft picks to turn into a capable NBA player; Ayo Dosunmu, the Chicago native and Illinois (that's ok he's forgiven) star who is the type of defensive player and shooter every team wants; Nikola Vucevic, the double-double machine with the imperiously rectangular head; Dalen Terry, a delightful bench celebrator who never really figured out how to play basketball; and Julian Phillips who was pretty much the exact same guy as Terry but more serious. In is guard Jaden Ivey, guard Rob Dillingham, guard Anfernee Simons, guard Colin Sexton, forward Gershon Yabusele, forward Leonard Miller, and center Nick Richards.
Ivey is the most intriguing prospect, a superstar at Purdue who is coming off a gruesome leg injury and couldn't find a role with the ascendant Pistons who do not have the luxury of letting him find his footing. It is possible that Ivey, whose entire calling card was his athleticism, will not be able to recover it and joins the pantheon of Bulls guards with catastrophic leg issues. Dillingham is small and slight, a speedy shooter who the Minnesota Timberwolves have had no use for despite desperately coveting him in the draft. Simons and Sexton are competent NBA run 'n gun guards who are playing out the string with the Bulls and are now in a guard rotation that will also include Josh Giddey and Tre Jones, who are both out with hamstring injuries. The question will be whether Billy Donovan can resist playing Sexton and Simons, who can help the Bulls win games, at the expense of Ivey and Dillingham, who will presumably be on the team next year (Ivey is a restricted free agent). If the Bulls are indeed tanking the rest of the season, it does not really makes sense to play veterans who will be free agents and have every incentive to get their numbers up at every opportunity.
Did you know that Pete Nance is getting minutes for the moribund Milwaukee Bucks this season?
Yabusele, the Frenchman known for dunking LeBron James into an underground crypt in the Olympics, and Richards are here because you do need big people people, to play basketball.
Will this new Bulls strategy (a "pivot," perhaps in the nauseatingly pervasive American business-argot) lead the Bulls back to glory? It seems unlikely. The Bulls, in their new attempt to be really bad on purpose, have already won too many games to "catch" the teams who have been either intentionally bad or the Sacramento Kings all year, and will likely miss out on a top pick in a draft the analysts have been salivating over. Carlos Boozer has two sons in this draft, and it would be nice to see them in Bulls red following in the footsteps of the teams' loudest player. It is also unlikely this will work out for the Bulls because they are owned by people who are only interested in making money and run by incompetents baffling the league. Or the right combination of numbers will come up and they'll get Darryn Peterson (another guard btw) and return to glory.
I have to admit, I have been more interested than usual in the Bulls since the deadline, since I can't help but want to see what the new guys look like in Bulls uniforms, how they play, what nicknames Stacey King has come up with for them (I have so far heard "Poison Ivey" and both "Yabu Be There" and "Yabu Daba Doo;" at least Karnisovas is looking out for Stacey King with his player acquisitions). In highlights, of course. My TV provider no longer provides Bulls games, so I no longer watch them on TV. Maybe that is more of a problem with the NBA right now than tanking.
