The NBA Draft Culminates With The Historic Selection of Another Northwestern Guy

When anyone talks about the NBA draft in 2026 as historical, you should assume they are talking about it as the second consecutive year a team selected a Northwestern player. Last year, the Thunder sent an earthquake through the NBA when they selected Brooks Barnhizer at 44, a selection so unexpectedly early that I missed it on the broadcast while eating dinner, intending to white knuckle through the last dozen picks while hoping to hear his name. And when the entire Oklahoma City roster was hit by waves of injuries the year after a punishing grind through the Finals, Barnhizer was on the court in actual NBA games.

The number of players drafted out of Northwestern in the last two years

I was more skeptical about Martinelli's chances to get drafted. While Barnhizer fits in a recognizable NBA archetype as a rugged defender, ball-handler, and tough guy taking full advantage of an NBA dental plan, Martinelli destroyed the Big Ten with an unorthodox throwback game. I am not an NBA Draft Guy, but through years of watching the draft and absorbing the bloviation surrounding it, I have developed at least a vague sense of what NBA teams are looking for in 2026, and it generally is not a brawny fifth-year senior left-handed hook shot specialist who jumps when he shoots free throws.

A few things went Martinelli's way. One is that he was undeniable: two years of scoring dominance in one of the best college conferences that boasts scads of those rocket-legged nineteen-year-olds that NBA teams covet while he toiled on mediocre teams that were ravaged by injuries in one year and then just full of new or inexperienced players that all immediately left Evanston after the season like a carnival pulling up stakes in the middle of the night. 

The other is that it is now legal to pay college basketball players and while being a skilled, battle-tested college basketball veteran is a good way to get picked in the second round, it is now far more lucrative for those players to enter the transfer portal and help a team win a championship. There is now a class of wizened Perry Ellis-aged college basketball mercenaries flowing from mid-majors and lesser power conference programs into the top teams where they are clinging to well-deserved NIL millions and forestalling having to ride a bus in the G-League or learn the conversion rate from drachmas. A lot of those players went back to college, leaving more room for Martinelli, who had exhausted every possible avenue to continue to play for Northwestern, to get drafted and earn the opportunity to shove around some hapless summer league jabronis.

The fact that two players have gone in the draft in two consecutive years and that the Wildcats have made recent repeat appearances in the NCAA Tournament would make it look like Northwestern is on the rise, but I can't think of a time when the men's basketball team was in a stranger place. Last year's team, while not particularly good, was at least interesting because of Martinelli's heroics filling in around a group of freshmen learning the game. It seemed like Martinelli would leave and the program would turn over to promising first-years Jake West and Tre Singleton. Instead, Singleton transferred along with virtually every other player on the team except for West and south side forearm enthusiast Angelo Ciaravino. Teams like to set highlights to musical montages, but Northwestern had an offseason that could only be scored to the piano outro from Layla. For a week or two, it looked like Northwestern simply no longer had a men's basketball team.

Chris Collins and his staff have since filled the team with transfers from smaller conferences and and a few recruits, but it's pretty clear that Northwestern's model of having players stick around and come into their own their junior and senior year no longer works, and they're now slopping around in the transfer market scrum with everyone else promising nothing more than an opportunity to haughtily refuse to play in The Crown for the next two to three seasons that tournament exists. The Boo Buie-era tournament teams from three years ago already seem like relics from a bygone era of college basketball.

It was still a long wait for Martinelli to get his name called. He went at pick 55 to the Clippers after a series of trades. Players in the second round are not valued particularly highly, but the picks for some reason remain a functional NBA currency, so they fly around in byzantine trades and arbitrage moves, flummoxing the television analysts.

The pick was originally made by the Houston Rockets, who got it in a swap getting the best pick between Phoenix, Houston, and Brooklyn, which of course means that this pick belongs to Los Angeles. LOOK!!!!! 

I'm not sure what to make of a bizarre Clippers team that has gone from all in on elderly veterans centered on Kawhi Leonard to a team with Leonard in trade rumors while he and the team remain caught up in allegations that, to my understanding, the team used its connections to a fraudulent tree-planting concern vaguely associated with the carbon credit market to make enormous payments to Leonard in order to circumvent the salary cap in a high-level twenty-first century Illegal Business Move masterminded by billionaire Clippers owner and armpit-stained Microsoft bellower Steve Ballmer. I assume Martinelli will mostly play in the G League this season, but the Clippers are in a strange enough spot that they might give him a shot.

OH YEAH THE BULLS ALSO DRAFTED SOME GUYS 

Another reason I was locked in on the draft was because the Bulls had somehow lucked into the fourth pick in what has been described as an unusually talent-rich pool and had another at fifteen. More importantly, the Bulls had kicked avant-garde basketball executive Arturas Karnisovas to the curb and hired Bryson Graham, a young draft guru who at least seemed like he was interested in building a normal NBA team and not whatever bizarre version of the NBA existed in Karnisovas's brain. For the last decade or so, the only comment you could hear on the Bulls from national NBA media was "I don't know what the Bulls are doing." Now there's at least a chance that they can be understandably bad.

My major concern with Graham is that he has one of those Sports Philosophy Acronyms that describes something obvious that most people want (SLAP: Size, Length, Athleticism, Physicality). That's fine for him, but it immediately reminds me of Matt Eberflus constantly referring to the HITS principle where the T that stood Takeaways somehow changed into The Ball, making this one of the funniest stupid acronyms I've ever seen. Seeing "The Ball" up there next to "Smart" (just throwing in an adjective in there) will never not crack me up. Even PJ Fleck is shaking his head on that one. Or S.H.O.T. (Shaking Head on That)

The Bulls picked up human pogo stick Caleb Wilson frrrrrommmmm NORTH CARoLINa, who is doomed to being called "Caleb Williams" by every single sports radio caller and sports radio caller-type guy in the entire Chicagoland area, and ultra athletic wing Dailyn Swain from Texas. Wilson was seen as the fourth-best player in a draft that had three players touted as potential top picks in any other year. He is thought of as much better coming out of college than the Bulls' previous number four pick Patrick Williams, a relative enigma who after years in the depressing miasma of Chicago Bulls basketball has turned into one of the worst players in the NBA. Swain is someone I haven't really heard much about, but was apparently a scoring engine for the Longhorns after spending a year as a defensive stopper at Xavier. Both players feature highlight reels featuring slam dunks powerful enough to have their own blast radius; neither appears to have a functional jump shot, which is the important through line they share with pretty much every Bulls draft pick in recent memory.

The Bulls have not had much luck getting anything out of draft picks, but they have a new coach after Billy Donovan decided he has enough Bulls basketball for a lifetime. Graham hired former Spurs center Tiago Splitter who took over the Portland job because Chauncey Billups was arrested in connection with a gambling ring by the FBI after the first game of the season. Billups and Damon Jones were accused of working with the mafia to rig a series of poker games designed to take in the type of sucker that would be wowed to play poker with Chauncey Billups; Jones has now been targeted by the FBI for illegal gambling and JR Smith who reportedly threw a bowl of soup at him when he was an assistant coach with the Cavs. Splitter emerged from that Oliver Stone sports movie scenario and guided a young, incomplete Blazers through the play-in, a season that inadvertently helped the Bulls by giving them a Blazers draft pick left over from a complex 2021 trade involving Lauri Markkanen that Portland had avoided having to convey by playing like absolute garbage year after year.

Splitter was only available because sleazy new Blazers owner Tom Dundon lowballed him badly before signing former Timberwolves assistant Micah Nori to a contract where I believe he places an enormous pile of dollar bills on the scorer's table and removes them one by one every time Nori makes a substitution or runs a play he doesn't like-- until the Splitter hiring it was almost impossible to imagine a situation where the Bulls take advantage of an owner being cheaper than the Reisndorfs. 

I have one problem with Splitter and that is that he breaks the crucial pattern of Hair Guys and Bald Assholes the Bulls have been cycling through the twenty-first century. By this pattern, the Bulls would have needed to hire a bald guy who already has levied fines against players for loafing because he has seen instagram photos of them lounging by a luxurious pool over the summer, one who not only installs a factory punch card in the practice facility but an actual assembly line where players have to put together transmissions on their off-hours, a guy who has to have an assistant whose job is to prize his bulbous bald head out of drywall that he has headbutted in rage after seeing a player miss a defensive assignment. By the pattern, the Bulls should have hired Jason Kidd. Instead, they are going right from Billy Donovan to another man with hair and apparently an ability to regulate his own emotions as much as an NBA coach is capable.

One shadow over the season is the loss of Stacey King. King, who died at the age of 59 from a reported fall in his home, was for many seasons the only reason to turn into the Bulls' miserable, mediocre teams. After the Bulls sold off their remaining good players for an array of crappy draft picks and guys who would briefly be on the Bulls solely for immaculate grid purposes this winter, I tuned in just to see what nicknames King would come up with-- the predictable "Poison Ivey" for the few games Jaden Ivey played for the team before being dismissed for making troubling, hateful instagram videos, and the inspired "Yabu Be There" for ephemeral power forward Guershon Yabusele.  

Many people will rightfully remember King as an entertaining backup for the early Dynasty Bulls and for his calls of Derrick Rose highlights or even the Red Foxx symphony he uncorked while calling the Josh Giddey halfcourt shot to beat the Lakers. One of my favorite highlight of his remains when he decided that some Washington Wizard cannon fodder named Oleksiy Pecherov's oblong head reminded King of the baby from Family Guy, which led to him screaming things like HE PUT STEWIE IN THE BASKET and GET OUT THE WAY, FAMILY GUY after Andres Nocioni threw down a truly sick dunk where he appeared to be levitating on a beach chair on him. Stacey King is the only person in the world who would nickname the dour Nikola Vucevic "Voochi Mane."

 

But this is a post about the second round of the NBA Draft, and the hope that the regime change meant the Reinsdorfs would reconsider doing Reinsdorf things evaporated when the Bulls announced they had sold one of their second round picks for cash. That was a low pick, (albeit one directly after Martinelli was taken-- if the Bulls had sold the Martinelli pick this post would just be a series of increasingly arcane swear words), but then the Bulls traded their much higher second rounder to the Pacers for some obscure pick swaps and a player who underwhelmed in his rookie year after getting arrested for leading police on a high-speed four mile chase. That was almost a relief after I was temporarily flabbergasted that the Bulls had picked Purdue's Braden Smith, who had annoyed me for seemingly all fifteen years of his college career. 

It is the sad fate of a fan of a salary cap league to have to be concerned with how much money players are making. This should be none of our business; I should have no opinion about Patrick Williams making $90 million dollars beyond "I hope Patrick Williams has a wonderful and fulfilling life off the basketball court." There should be no sports league where a fan should be confronted with the term "apron." But even in the spreadsheet and financial instrument version of professional basketball we get in 2026, selling draft picks does absolutely nothing for the team. It doesn't provide cap relief or allow the team to reinvest in other players. It just takes money that would be spent on a young, unproven player who has a small but not impossible chance of contributing and sticks it directly in the owners' pocket. It is crazy that it's a transaction that teams can still do.

Despite the online tsuris about selling picks, the Bulls have hope for the first time in years. Caleb Wilson looks like the best chance the Bulls have at getting a star player since Jimmy Butler. This battered, cynical fanbase does not yet know enough about Bryson Graham to turn on him and put up billboards demanding he get fired for being terrible at his job yet.

Of course, the Bulls will be terrible next year. Wilson and Swain for all their promise, are still rookies. Wilson also plays pretty much the same position as top player Matas Buzelis and Noa Essengue, last year's top pick who missed pretty much the whole season with an injury but is still younger than Wilson and most of the players in this year's draft. Josh Giddey is still here dribbling like one of the enchanted brooms from Fantasia. The Bulls will likely spend most of the season chasing mediocrity because of new draft lottery rules, an irony since this was Karnisovas's specialty. At some point, Wilson is going to throw down an insane dunk on someone and Stacey King won't be there to admonish that player for being dumb enough to get in his way.  And if that player is Nick Martinelli, at least it would be very cool to see him get the opportunity to get dunked on in the NBA.   

A Review of GarPax's Most Infernal Intrigues and Bone-Crunching Physical Assualts

Sports may be shut down, arenas may be empty, and the entire world might be on quarantine, but that will not stop the intrigue gears from spinning at Bulls Headquarters.  One of the only meaningful pieces of sports news-- that is to say sports news divorced from the pandemic and the eternal question of when sports will start up, whether billionaire owners will deign to pay stadium support staff, and what sorts of choreographed line dances professional athletes are tik toking in their estates-- is that the Bulls, in a seemingly impossible coup, have hired a new front office.  They brought in Denver GM Arturas Karnisovas as Vice President of Basketball Operations, sidelined John Paxson into a reportedly salaried position to sort of hang out, and finally hurled Gar Forman into a crevasse in the crust of the earth.

This being the Bulls, reporting has suggested that the change came from Paxson.  Only on the Bulls can change come from an executive finally deciding to scheme against the only opponent strong enough to beat Paxson in a bureaucratic battle-- himself.

There have been millions of words by aggrieved Bulls fans written on the internet about the Paxson and Forman years, but while it is important to lament the various Doug McDermott trades throughout the years, I'm more drawn to the atmosphere of paranoia and dread surrounding the organization as it retreated further into a sclerotic decline that led to people screaming FIRE GARPAX at Stephen A. Smith as he attempted to interview Zach LaVine.  So, here are some episodes and vignettes as a review of the Garpax era.

Randy Brown's Espionage Cell Activated to Pass Crucial Intelligence About Fred Hoiberg

"Gar has never come to me and said, 'Hey, Randy, I want you to be a spy in Fred Hoiberg's locker room.' That doesn't even sound right. Gar and Pax (executive vice president John Paxson) would never ask me to do that. And Fred Hoiberg knows that." Randy Brown to the Chicago Tribune, Feb. 4, 2017.

Rumors circulated among allegations from Jimmy Butler and somehow Rip Hamilton that assistant coach and former Jordan-era Bull Randy Brown was a spy in the locker room for Gar Forman, who recruited him to play for New Mexico in the 1980s.  These players accused Brown of discussing the inevitably complicated Bulls locker room politics to Forman and, we can assume, strategically hiding in lockers, using DNA from discarded towels to have facial reconstruction surgery when he needed to disguise himself as Jerian Grant, locking himself in the trunk of Robin Lopez's car in order to compile a dossier of rides he likes at Six Flags Great America, and doing "wet work" when it was necessary to destroy one of Paul Zipser's knees because he had badmouthed Forman in a German-language newspaper not understanding the reach of Forman's network on the Continent.

Many basketball teams have had fucked up, dysfunctional locker rooms.  Few have approached the truly operatic feuding between various camps of players, coaches, and the omnipresent front office than the Three Alphas Era Bulls that resembled the feuding component states of the Holy Roman Empire.  But there are also few teams that have had so many allegations of spying from the front office; this is not even my favorite or funniest incidence of alleged espionage from the Bulls.

Everyone involved has denied these allegations, but I just want anyone reading this to think about Gar Forman, dressed like a German walk signal, silently passing papers to undercover basketball operatives at the United Center-adjacent Billy Goat Tavern while saying cryptic passwords like "it feels like spring so often for one week in February" that tell the person to compile a detailed report on whether Fred Hoiberg is getting through to Denzel Valentine.

Bulls Players Open Roaring, Grunting, Shaking Shipping Crate, Unleash Jim Boylen

The Bulls fired Fred Hoiberg and then, arriving from a secure basketball coaching facility, was a flesh-skulled maniac wailing and gnashing its teeth and demanding wind sprints.  Boylen had been on Hoiberg's staff and had won a championship as one of Gregg Popovich's assistants, but I don't think anyone had seen this coming, this surreal mutant gym teacher taking over the Bulls and immediately wreaking so much havoc that the players needed to form a bureaucratic structure for Corporate Governance in an attempt to shield themselves from him.

Jim Boylen has to be one of the funniest coaches in NBA history.  I have often written about sports coaching as a position bereft of dignity-- it is difficult for someone to become a gris eminence when there are hundreds of hours of footage of that person screaming at officials, throwing clipboards, sniping at beat reporters, and sweating through the suits that they have to wear for some reason; the price that coaches pay for exorbitant salaries and fame is that they are some of the few people whose apoplexy gets captured repeatedly by cameras, and they also are constantly subjected to having Stan from Glen Elyn call into sports talk radio every day and talk about how incompetent they are while trying not to get into an accident on the Eisenhower Expressway.  But Boylen has done himself no favors-- he comes across as an oaf, a boob, a strange maniac who regardless of his knowledge about basketball has seemed to also be a person who has no idea how to connect with people, handle the press, or exist in a human society that is not solving problems with through a ritual combat by dodgeball.


That's when the attack comes SWISH from the sides from the two 
other Jim Boylens you didn't even know were there

The uncertainty around the NBA and sports leagues in general in the midst of this pandemic has made Boylen's job status unclear.  There might not be a point to firing a coach while there are no games being played and while his job duties are probably teleconferencing with players with his bulbous head filling up a zoom window while screaming at them about how he's "jacked up" to see them doing pushups on Instagram or whatever.  But we can assume that Boylen cannot be long for the Bulls and while hiring a more competent and palatable maniac will be better for the team, we will all be losing out on his press conferences, bizarre quotes, and his weird and infuriating time outs at the end of games the Bulls have no chance of winning that have nearly caused altercations.

The Bulls also in the past had also elevated an interim coach named "Jim Boylan" who was an entirely different person and this has nothing to do with the previous paragraphs but it blows my mind every time I think about it.

The Bulls Send Luol Deng for a Recreational Spinal Tap

Sports fans have a tendency to blame their team's medical staffs for rashes of injuries, and this is not always fair.  Most fans are not physicians or professional sports trainers and have no idea what teams are or are not doing to prevent and treat injuries. Many injuries are the result of the fact that sports asks athletes to make insane and unnatural demands on their bodies and, in basketball, players are constantly jumping, landing, and getting bashed in the sternum by either Dale or Antonio Davis. 

But in some cases team's medical staffs can make mistakes that are clear and disastrous, and that would be the time that the Chicago Bulls sent Luol Deng to get an unnecessary spinal tap that could have killed him in 2013.  Deng had been complaining about flu-like symptoms.  Bulls doctors diagnosed him with meningitis and sent him to the hospital for the procedure, which developed complications including leaking spinal fluid.  Deng lost fifteen pounds in a few days and was beset with intense headaches.  The Bulls listed him as out with "flu-like symptoms."

No one here is arguing that the Bulls deliberately sent Deng into a dangerous medical situation but the Bulls front office touch was to do so in the midst of an atmosphere of downplaying injuries and illnesses.  Here is how one anonymous Bulls staffer put it in a scouting report quoted in this ESPN article from 2013:

Luol called me and told me he was really sick and had to go to the hospital. This was when we were in Miami in the playoffs ... soon after I get off the phone with Luol (redacted) play, that he's on his way to Miami. I told Thibs there is no way, he's on his way to the hospital, it was a bad situation. He blamed the team and they put pressure on him to play when he was seriously sick.

The article also mentions the entire incident happened in the context of the Bulls pressuring Deng to put off surgery to an injured wrist in the previous season.  The entire thing also happened in the maelstrom of the front office's neverending war with Derrick Rose over whether or not he was ready to come back from his various catastrophic knee injuries that had reached a boiling point that spring, when the Bulls believed Rose was ready to return and Rose decided to miss the rest of the season.  The Bulls and Rose feuded in the newspapers for awhile, and the relationship between the team and Rose soured while Bulls players questioned the organization's commitment to their health or grinding away to heroic second-round playoff exits.

 Tom Thibodeau's Staff Enacts the Moscow Rules

The thing I most appreciate about the GarPax area is their dedication to general Cold War tradecraft.  NBA teams have traditional folkways of dysfunction: feuding with players, undermining coaches in the press, or even exploring the avant garde ends of dysfunction like the time Mark Jackson attempted a bizarre process of psychologically torturing Festus Ezeli.  The Bulls, though, made this into an art.  The Bulls were running agents and, in my favorite GarPax allegation originally made by Adrian Wojnarowski, bugging offices.  Woj claimed that Bulls personnel were employing the classic tactic of running electric fans as white noise because they feared that Forman was listening to their phone conversations. 

I should note that there is no evidence that anyone bugged the offices.  There is also no evidence that Gar Forman drove a van marked Bannockburn Utility Landscape and Lawn Sculpture around the practice facility for surveillance purposes or cut off trade talks saying "not now I'm in the van."  No allegations have at this time surfaced of Bulls players using yellow chalk in a telling location over Kirk Hinrich's garage to announce a secret meeting or attempts to spirit away Ron Adams over the Glienicke bridge.

John Paxson Tries to Murder Vinny Del Negro Over Joakim Noah's Minutes

The delicate interplay of player usage, injuries, and toughness has become a hot-button issue in the NBA in recent years as teams have increasingly rested players, come up with a semi-scientific term that Sloan Sports people can use so they can say "load management" and pretend that it's an Analytic, and given Jeff Van Gundy something else to complain about, but nowhere in basketball did that play out as dramatically as the time that John Paxson attempted to shove his hand through Vinny Del Negro's chest in an argument about whether Joakim Noah was playing too many minutes.

Paxson has enjoyed recreationally feuding with his coaches.  Though he generally seems to prefer sniping at them in the press, undermining them, and then hiring a new one based on his criteria that all coaches must follow the eternal cycle of a Hair Guy giving way to a Bald Asshole, in this case he decided to showcase his Aggressive Shove Style of martial art.  Paxson then had Bulls assistants wheel out a table full of weapons while he gave Del Negro the option to either do a knife fight with their wrists tied together like in the Michael Jackson Beat It video or to dip their fists in glue and then in shards of glass before fighting to the death on the roof the Berto Center.  

Instead, Paxson holstered his fists and bided his time for a few weeks to fire Del Negro.  Within a couple seasons, he would be in an open war with Thibodeau, would fire his replacement Fred Hoiberg within a few seasons, and then hire Jim Boylen, an inept doofus who is the laughingstock of the NBA and whom Paxson seems to love.  Perhaps Boylen has already defeated him in combat.
 
ESPN will be airing a 10-hour documentary about the 1997-8 Bulls, another organization that was riven with dysfunction, conflict, and revolt among the front office, the players, and the coaching staff.  But in this case the conflicts came from a team that spent the 1990s as one of the most dominant teams at anything in my life; the conflict served as a dramatic undercurrent to all of the winning, destroying Karl Malone, Jordan referring to his centers as "twenty-one feet of shit," etc.  During the GarPax era, the Bulls got a few really good teams and a lot of years where the most compelling thing about the Bulls was the deranged bureaucratic infighting.