World Cup Review: The Guys, The Main Guys, and The Big Guy

I do not regularly follow any soccer league, not because I have any issue with the sport but simply because I believe that I have reached my personal limit of how much of my brain can be dedicated to knowing about various sports guys. The soccer universe is huge; there are entire continents of Soccer Guys out there floating from Edinburgh to Azerbaijan in deals for millions of Euros, all of whom I believe spend every second off the pitch moving in the liminal space between sports car and night club. The human mind is not designed to be able to simultaneously behold the entire deals of Mario Balotelli, Jordan Poole, and Dabo Swinney simultaneously, or at least my mind is not.  

This is why the World Cup is the perfect soccer competition for me to get into. I understand that national team soccer is, for the aficionados, a hodgepodge of whatever soccer players happen to be allowed to play for a certain country and not a fine-tuned mechanism built with certain players brought over in specific roles at great expense; the top teams in the world can simply go out and get the best center back on the market instead of realizing that their key defensive player is a 38-year-old who looks like a muscled up Thom Yorke. The people who sneer at World Cup play also overlap dangerously with the species of American soccer fan who yells things like "catch the fuckin' ball, dipshit!" on weeknights at football guys but for several hours on early weekend mornings start saying things like "the defence are a bloody shambles!" and "my mum is in hospital" and can be safely ignored.

 

It's possible there are guys like this at 6am Pacific time singing to the tune of Champagne Supernova "Arsenal are wankers eating pies!" and saying oh by the way did you get the despatch in the post about the by-election?

Four years is a perfect amount of time for someone who follows a sport casually when it comes to the careers of soccer guys. It is a significant amount of time in a human lifespan where a soccer player arrives as an exciting young phenom and then returns as an established superstar and then spends the next few cycles as either a stalwart or a disappointment that has flamed out of a European superteam in the throes of what British tabloids are referring to as an "Instagram Horror Divorce" with all of the attendant soccer-related hairstyles implied by these lifestyle changes. There are times you remember a guy from a cup or two ago as an aged captain desperately rallying his team in one last charge and then you see him again in a box and he is 51 years old, potbellied, and has those gleaming cartoon John Lackey teeth. There are times when that guy is still somehow on the team as a third goalkeeper.

The expanded World Cup has, despite fears of watering down the early rounds, succeeded wildly. Many teams that had rarely or never qualified got an opportunity to play with ecstatic fans happy to be there. The story of the Cup group stages was Cape Verde, a team that drew European giant Spain and gave everything they had to Argentina in a wild game featuring two late goals dragging the defending champions to extra time and nearly to penalties with an incredible game-tying goal before succumbing to a late Argentina goal in what was one of the best sporting events of the year. An unknown Cape Verdean 40 year-old goalkeeper nicknamed Vozhina became a global star with his performance throughout the tournament; the World Cup might be the only competition outside of the Olympics that can take an obscure guy playing in the Portuguese second division to a person known by billions in the course of three weeks. I look forward to saying "does anyone remember how cool Vozhina was" in ten years.

The World Cup has had some controversies. One is the application of video review (VAR), which is not new but has created the same epistemic challenges as every other video review process in every sport where the granular technicality of video meets a rule book designed for human beings to judge with human eyeballs. But while I find the VAR process as annoying in international soccer as I do when the last 38 seconds of an NCAA Tournament Game take 15 minutes as a group of officials decide whether a basketball grazed the outermost molecules of a pinky, a video review is responsible for one of my favorite moments of the tournament: when a Paraguayan player was caught illegally covering his mouth (this was banned for the depressing reason that players were allegedly doing this to shield their lips from being read while they uttered slurs) and the referee yelled "After review, number ten Paraguay cover his mouth. The decision is... RED CARD!" It is impossible to convey in text the dramatic weight of the referee's announcement. He seems personally disgusted. He yells out "decision is RED CARD" like he has just sentenced him to Mortal Kombat. I have been unable to stop thinking about number ten and how he cover his mouth for weeks.  

 

Video review has given referees a voice because otherwise silent officials now have to explain what the heck they were doing when they were squinting at a television monitor for five minutes while the TV audience sees 500 replays slowed down to the atomic level. Before, the only refs I was used to hearing were in football where you'd be subjected to minutes of Ed Houchuli monologues or a ref speak in one of the two acceptable accents in college football which are Southern and Jon Gruden. Replay review and now automated ball-strike challenges have ruined a magical element of baseball by revealing that umpires just sound like guys instead of imagining that they are only capable of communicating with their Individual Strike Bellow that are assigned in umpire school (Arise! Your Strike Call is now HRRRRNNNNKKK").

The other major controversy at the World Cup of course involves the president of the United States. 

THE BIG GUY WEIGHS IN 

There is a certain type of person who has understandably had their mind completely fried by the existence of Donald Trump. It has been admittedly impossible for normal person to operate at maximum sanity when someone like this has somehow become the main character of American life for more than a decade. But some people, and-- based on how it appears you can get published in a major magazine as a Serious Political Thinker writing solely on this premise-- particularly people who I see posting online, have had their brains completely colonized by the activities and utterances of the 45th and 47th president. They still can't believe anyone won't stop him other than the one thing that I think even he can't get out of. He, and I can't believe I am the first person to point this out, uses a lot of self-tanner that makes him look in a certain light look kind of orange.

These people are no longer capable of having a thought that does not eventually resolve itself to Donald John Trump, and they want you to know about it in internet posts. They seem to spend all of their time imagining scenarios where something completely unrelated to politics could somehow make him upset-- if you spend time reading about sports, you see these people pop out of discussion threads or their native habitat of bluesky replies like that part in Rambo II when Rambo has disguised himself as a giant pile of mud on a tree and then you just see his eyes open up in order to turn every sports contest into a referendum on what result would be better or worse for Trump. 

The practice of trying to figure out what this guy is thinking by weighing various imagined pro- or anti-MAGA elements of every single person involved in a sporting event is far more effort than he has ever put into thinking about anything. It is 2026 and the fact that mainstream media is still devoting any resources to what this guy is thinking is baffling; the only thing going on up there I believe is his personal version of the scene from Being John Malkovich where John Malkovich enters the portal to his own brain and only sees Malkoviches saying "Malkovich."

Unfortunately for the sports world, the Big Guy had to go ahead and directly plug himself into an American soccer match and unleash some of the worst sports discourse I have ever seen. If you are alive, then you already know what happened: American striker Folarin Balogun, who had been playing with unusual verve and skill for this team-- a normal American striker is a large immobile guy who can't really dribble and is deployed like one of those battering rams that have a face of a scary goat on the end of it-- picked up a sort of dubious-looking VAR-induced red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina that led to an automatic suspension for the next game. The day before the next game, FIFA made the unprecedented decision to reverse the red card suspension and rule him eligible for the Belgium game under some sort of double secret probation arrangement.

The entire process seemed corrupt. FIFA, a money-laundering organization that has somehow tied itself to international soccer, released a statement citing irregularities in the application of the hated video review process. No one really bought that. The head of FIFA is Gianni Infantino, a sentient pair of eyebrows who loves nothing more than cozying up to the most disgusting autocrats in the world. He has almost perfect corrupt bureaucrat physiognomy. He seems like he would have no problem shamelessly asking for a "bribeissimo." Somehow this guy seems to be at every single World Cup game at once, and the FIFA broadcast is constantly cutting to him in the booth looking vaguely annoyed that no one is currently bringing him a canvas sack full of bearer bonds. 

The main thing you want in the president of FIFA is a guy who looks like he is sitting in the backseat of a European sports car handcuffed to the World Cup trophy as his driver attempts to evade every character in the John Frankenheimer classic Ronin

Trump claimed to have called FIFA officials to complain about the Balogun card. I am not sure what the exact sequence of events was. It seems possible that a FIFA review independently came to this conclusion. It seems possible that FIFA officials reversed Balogun's suspension in a sort of "working towards the fuhrer" situation. It seems likely to me that Trump simply did the patented Donald Trump move of claiming credit for it after the fact to make him seem powerful and important and somehow make the news talk about him even more. Either way, the narrative quickly became that Trump made FIFA cheat to give the United States an advantage and this swallowed up everything about the game.

The funny thing about this entire debacle, to me, is that everyone was acting as if an American soccer player was actually important enough to warrant this amount of discourse. Imagine this all playing out if a referee had made it so the USMNT was unable to play some Graham Zusi-type guy.

The reversed Balogun suspension did the absolute worst thing possible: it directly inserted Donald Trump into the World Cup. The tedious, insane people of the internet no longer had to concoct elaborate scenarios to imagine which countries or personalities winning the Cup would annoy him; the entire World Cup was now about him. Perhaps it always had been. The cheeto was calling from inside the house.

Trump had already managed to put his glowering imprint on the Cup as the head of a host nation. The government denied entry visas to fans from Middle Eastern and African fans including the Congolese Patrick Lumumba Statue Guy. American officials denied a visa to a Somali referee, preventing him from being the first Somali referee to ever work a World Cup (a FIFA rule apparently required all of the referees to report to a base camp in Florida, which made it impossible for him to referee matches in Mexico and Canada). The government subjected the Iranian team to draconian travel restrictions that made them fly in and out of the United States on match days that no other team had to deal with. There are, I am sure, a large number of other examples of hapless soccer fans being pointlessly subjected to racist bullshit from the government since racist violence and harassment seems to be the only function the government is capable of. As much as Americans have enjoyed watching soccer fans come over here and marvel at our fast food and gas stations and take over baseball games despite having no idea what is going on, it is impossible to ignore that Trump is unfortunately our Main Guy.

There is one thing the president is good at and it is getting the media to lock onto him like the Eye of Sauron any time he wants, and he hijacked everything about the American team. The World Cup is one of the great causal sports events, the biggest tent sporting event in the world bringing in people who would ordinarily not care about soccer or sports out of sheer joy or just wanting to be a part of the spectacle; when the Big Guy decided to Kool-Aid Man his way into it, he brought in the people who actively hate sports, who call it "sports ball" and "bread and circuses" because he was now involved. A Trumpball was happening. 

Just weeks ago, Trump did the same thing with the Knicks by appearing in Madison Square Garden for a finals game, seizing the narrative of that game and somehow doing the impossible by making a Knicks finals run more annoying. His presence brought out tedious politics dweebs who spent the entire playoffs inexplicably claiming that New York City had invented the concept of sports fandom. They condemned Trump's appearance and claimed that it messed with the "vibes," the most tiresome, meaningless word of the twenty-first century. The Knicks lost that game before rallying to win the rest of the Trumpless games and have a big parade and rally for what certain parts internet have assured me was the first time in the history of sports. Now, these people, people with screen names like HE IS A TRAITOR who post AI text memes, and an army of humorless European scolds had come together to condemn the American team and demand they bench Balogun out of a sense of honor, and make a bunch of Pronouncements and possibly cut off their own fingers at midfield.

I do not blame anyone for rooting against the USMNT; I am a Northwestern football fan and I am used to rooting for a historically crappy team that people hate for understandable reasons that have nothing to do with sports. You can understand why people around the world see a country that has invaded or threatened to invade a not insignificant percentage of the nations playing and decided to root against its soccer guys and want to see its legions of fans wearing weird eagle masks or dressed like a colonial musket guy to be on TV looking sad and bereft even if demographically the average American soccer fan is among the most likely species of American sports fan to have typed the word "drumpf" within the last six months. But the point I want to make is that the whole thing was an unbearably annoying monkey wrench in the spectacle of the Cup, and one that seemed even more unnecessary when the American team got absolutely torched by an incensed Belgium squad and did things like have the goalkeeper make one of the silliest mistakes of the entire cup by inexplicably running way out in front of the goal and then getting easily beaten to the ball and then when he tried to kick it, miss the ball entirely and hold up a tiny sign that says oh no before a boulder fell out of the sky and crushed him into an accordion. 

Before the game, The Royal Belgian Football Association sent out a disgusted letter about the Balogun situation and afterwards, video circulated of the team doing a sarcastic "Trump dance" in their locker room. I am not sure if Belgium crushed the United States because they were galvanized by the suspension reversal or because even a team of aging European stars on their last legs of a "golden generation" are much better at soccer than the most promising American team we had seen. But this team of Americans who played for European teams that even people like me have heard of certainly looked much worse than the 2014 team that took Belgium to extra time by letting them take 750 uncontested shots assuming Tim Howard would stop them. 

Fortunately the World Cup recovered. Argentina has played a classic in every game by going down early and then mounting an impossible Dillon Panthers-style comeback in every elimination game. The big Norwegian guy kept blasting goals and then kept getting photographed wearing a cowboy hat or driving a monster truck or doing mutton busting. And we all got to enjoy seeing pictures of English fans who have styled themselves aspirationally as Guy Ritchie henchmen lying drunk in a giant mud puddle in a place called like Twickenham-Upon-Pudding after their team was eliminated. Not even Trump or FIFA or the gazillion other corruptions that you can expect by combining FIFA and the United States in 2026 could stop it. 

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT SUMMER BASKETBALL UPDATE

Here is a picture of Boo Buie wearing a Bulls jersey while practicing with the summer league team.

 

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.   

Chicago Bulls at the Trade Deadline: Guards! Guards!

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. On the other hand, if he wanted to Donovan could do a bit where he keeps replacing a guard with another guard who is like an inch shorter for an entire half.

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.