The NBA's Pantomime Villainy and the Chicago Bulls

The best parts of Face/Off are when Nicolas Cage, playing a heroic FBI agent who had his face swapped with his sworn enemy using biotechnology and Windows 95, realizes that he has become, to the outside world, his own archnemesis and the only way to cope is to adopt his enemies' criminally insane behaviors, thus becoming what he hates-- and to show this internal emotional conflict by making extremely Nicolas Cage faces.  This also describes what the Chicago Bulls have done this offseason to their bewildered fans.

It was not enough for Gar Forman and John Paxson to send the faces of the team to New York and subject Bulls fans to maniacal Joakim Noah dunk screams in the hated uniform of John Starks and Patrick Ewing.  They also signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, the Bulls' own archnemeses.  Every time Wade grabs at his eye imploring the refs to call a foul or Rondo sourly walks away from Hoiberg in the middle of a timeout and then gets in a tiny scooter and just drives home in the middle of a game, Chicago fans will instinctively start to boo them only to realize they are on the Bulls now and so they are forced to imitate Cage's simultaneous weeping and maniacal leering out of sheer confusion.  

Travolta is clearly doing an impression of a maniacal Cage for most of the movie while Cage 
has to pretend to be a reasonable man forced to impersonate a maniacal Cage so the effect is 
like Being John Malkovich where all the leads are just maniacal Nicolas Cages making this face 
and blowing up vehicles at each other for 138 minutes.

The qualified Per Synergy Sports basketbloggers can explain better than me how Wade and Rondo make no sense for the Bulls.  Neither fits with Hoiberg's pace and space philosophy that exists on a chalkboard somewhere in the bowels of the Advocate Center.  Wade shot less than 16% from three last season; Rondo does not seem willing to shoot under any circumstances and appears to be modeling his game on the time Ricky Davis futilely shot at his own basket to get a triple double.  It has been about two weeks since Gar Forman justified the Rose trade by claiming the Bulls would get younger and more athletic. Now, he has acquired two players in their thirties with a history of knee problems.  But that is immaterial.  The Wade and Rondo moves are disasters because they the are two of the Bulls fans' most hated NBA players and I hate their jerk faces.

Rondo's crimes against the Bulls date back to the epic 2009 Bulls/Celtics playoff series when he threw Kirk Hinrich into a table like a professional wrestler and bludgeoned Brad Miller about the face.  A wobbly, dazed Miller could not hit his free throws.  Compounding the humiliation, the primary video evidence of the hit has been uploaded by a person named "patsfan000026" with NOT FLAGRANT superimposed on the bottom of it in such an obnoxiously-implied Boston accent that my computer has become infected with a virus and screams about Tom Brady being railroaded at random intervals.  Rondo managed to quit on a playoff team in Dallas so egregiously that they pretended he was injured.  His time on the Sacramento Kings, less a basketball organization than a boiling cauldron of insanity, climaxed with an ejection for screaming homophobic slurs at a referee.

The most interesting subplot on the Bulls this season will be the ways that Rondo manages to psychologically break Fred Hoiberg, who coaches with the intensity of a substitute math teacher.  Perhaps Rondo will humiliate Hoiberg in Connect Four in front of the entire team.  Perhaps he will convince Ol' Fred that everyone on the team is growing mustaches in November and then when Hoiberg walks into the advocate center as the only person with a mustache he is greeted by pictures of Ned Flanders plastered to the walls with a legend that says "HOIBERG."  Maybe Rondo will re-edit Hoiberg's game film, switching out the coach's beloved inspirational '80s movie scenes for horrifying Cronenbergian body horror while Hoiberg yells C'MON YOU SAID YOU NEEDED FINAL CUT PRO FOR FILM STUDY at him.

Benny the Bull disdainfully showers Rondo with popcorn when Rondo 
was injured and therefore forced to hurl insults at the Bulls on a regional 
television broadcast

Wade has, as far as I can tell, never used a part of the arena to attack Kirk Hinrich.  Nevertheless, he earned the ire of Bulls fans as the ringleader of the hated Heat.  Wade feuded with the Bulls when they had Ben Gordon and Ben Wallace and he feuded with Derrick Rose before Rose's knees disintegrated like the guy who drank from the wrong Holy Grail.  Wade's sins are more prosaic than Rondo's.  He flops.  He moans at officials so operatically that opponents easily dunk on the next possession because the NBA doesn't allow players to assign ghost players to defend while they are berating Scott Foster.  More than anything, Wade has existed as a very good player on a team that consistently beat the Bulls for more than a decade, the grossest basketball evil that can be committed against a team.

At the very least, the Wade move has backfired on Pat Riley.  Riley, a basketball innovator who invented advanced strategies such as telling Anthony Mason to elbow people and telling Alonzo Mourning to elbow people, has been irritating Bulls fans since the 1980s.  Now Riley has seen his carefully-cultivated Miami family narrative upended by a power play gone awry, which should give him something to think about as he sinks into the hair gel sarcophagus he sleeps in every night.  Miami has cap room, but it will be useless if Riley's hard bargaining tactics scare off potential free agents.  It is at the very least gratifying to imagine Riley striking out with big name free agents and then angrily feeding some flunky to the shark he keeps in his mansion to use as a metaphor for winning.

A threatened Riley instinctively displays his Championship Ring the way a startled lizard 
deploys a skin-fringe or puffs itself up by inflating gaseous sacs

Sports fandom represents, at best, a crude pantomime of emotions for fans.  Players can be gone in an instant, teams removed at the stroke of a pen, and all of the billions of dollars for pyrotechnics and jumbotrons and irritatingly peppy people walking around asking a seven year-old to name their favorite player for a t-shirt and television networks and guys in suits who are paid unfathomable sums of money to scream KEVIN DURANT IN MY OPINION IS NOT MAKING A MAN'S MOVE, KEVIN I AM LOOKING AT YOU NOW AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED, CHAGRINED, I AM GOING TO THROW HARD-BOILED EGGS AT YOUR FAMILY KEVIN and absolutely all of it is completely and utterly devoid of meaning.

Stephen A's speech threatening Kevin Durant is the funniest thing that has ever been on television

We can accept that and yet we will turn on a Bulls game to see the sneering face of Dwyane Wade and disgruntled surl-mugging from Rajon Rondo and wonder how this all happened. And when the Bulls play the Knicks next season, against Joakim Noah and Derrick Rose, we'll all feel as if we've seen the faces swapped, the tenets of basketball villainy undermined, the United Center filled with doves.  In an entertainment product as insane and capricious as professional sports, perhaps the most reasonable way to cope is to make Nicolas Cage faces and embrace the chaos.

The Futile, Asinine Task of Determining The Greatest Team of All Time

A championship has returned to Cleveland.  The Oracle Arena, described by the press and the Warriors' ownership as a virtual reality laboratory for the development of New Age basketball by players wearing those ping pong ball motion capture suits, may already lie in smoking ruins.  The Warriors capped off a historical run, won 73 games, and nearly clinched their second straight title. Instead, LeBron James did the one thing more impressive than that by actually winning a Cleveland sports championship.  The effort required a mythical performance; when James somehow outraced every player in the history of organized basketball to impale an Iguodala layup against the backboard, he all but came down from an ancient frieze.  The win capped off the Coming Home chapter for our most narrative athlete, embodied the hopes and dreams of American sports' most loudly martyred fanbase, and vanquished a team considered the greatest ever with an unprecedented comeback.  So let's talk about the Chicago Bulls.

The Chicago Bulls have cast a dunkman-shaped shadow over this NBA season.  The Warriors not only broke the Bulls' wins record, but did so with a freewheeling style utilizing absurdly long jumpshots that directly refuted the theology of 90s basketball.  All season long, the old players made their pilgrimages to television and radio studios to talk about how the Warriors were soft, how magical basketball sprite Stephen Curry would have been drawn and quartered by Antonio and Dale Davis, and how Michael Jordan would have broken into the Warriors' hotel and poisoned them because that is the type of competitor he was and then while they were bent over vomiting they would have been roughed up by Bill Wennington and Dickie Simpkins.  There is nothing a retired basketball player loves more than shitting on current players by threatening them with hypothetical violence.  But as the Warriors demolished all comers, the howling from the veterans of the Pat Riley Wars sounded like what it always had been: the anguished shriek of man against his own mortality and the diminished use of post moves.

Then the Warriors made history as the first team to squander a 3-1 lead in the Finals.  Their effortless shooting ground to a halt against a lineup featuring the mummified remains of Richard Jefferson. Basketblogger punching bag Kyrie Irving outplayed Steph Curry. Draymond Green became the Icarus of penis clobbering.  Their wins record is for naught.

Joe Lacob, the Warriors' swaggering tech-goblin owner made it easy to root 
against them when he said “The great, great venture capitalists who built 
company after company, that’s not an accident. And none of this is an accident, 
either...We’re light-years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in 
planning, in how we’re going to go about things," embodying the irritating hubris 
of Silicon Valley's aspirational App-Warlords. This feeling will last exactly as long as 
the first appearance of the Cavaliers' swaggering mortgage-goblin Dan Gilbert 
when he tries to take credit for James's unprecedented investment in the civic 
identity of Northeast Ohio even after Gilbert attacked him in the world's dumbest 
Corenlius Vanderbilt letter written in Crayola

As the Warriors closed in on the record, I was surprised by how much I became invested in their failure.  Nothing the Warriors did could rip those banners from the United Center. Nothing they did could take away their six championships.  They could not make Jud Buechler fade from those hideous '90s caricature shirts like a McFly sibling.

Phil Jackson looks like a generic evil businessman, all grace and manners and you and me 
we're not so different speeches until Dolph Lundren threatens his production of 
Cocaine II: The World's Most Potent drug.  Scottie Pippen is about to burst forth from 
someone's chest cavity

My own desire to see the Bulls' 1995-6 season enshrined at the top of an arbitrary hierarchy has no basis in any sort of value system.  I have nothing to offer to the Michael Jordan Take Industrial Complex or manifestos on the superiority of hand checks and apostate illegal defenses.  I only want the team I like to remain garlanded in whatever accolades I can cling to, and one of them is a claim to the nebulous title of the Greatest Team of All Time.

The decision to anoint the Greatest Team of All Time is such a fool's errand that we throw our most foolish hot take jesters at it.  Teams from past generations cannot play each other without folding space-time against itself.  Sports grow and evolve with new strategies and rules and, as movies and television tell us, into inevitable future death sports.  The whole enterprise devolves into hypothetical games of ghosts against ghosts.  It rests on a the deployment of numbers stripped of context and an-almost religious fervor.  There is no Greatest Team of All Time.


For Bulls fans, though, it is all we have.  Twenty years ago, they obliterated all comers, an overpriced sneaker stamping on the forehead of Karl Malone, forever.  Now, they remain, like their nemesis Eastern Conference Teams from the '90s, trapped in irrelevance because of a single dominant player. The same LeBron James who safeguarded the '96 Bulls' claim to Greatest of All Time status has simultaneously ruined any hope the current Bulls have of contending.  Chicago's great hometown hope has been strangled by his own knee ligaments.  They now have fallen into the pits of NBA despair: lottery picks, trade rumors, and a uniquely Bulls tendency to coat all of those things with a thick layer of unnecessary back-biting and soap-opera intrigue.  So forgive me if I forgo reading another article about whether or not Jimmy Butler is a leader to argue about Michael Jordan hand-checking Steph Curry down to mouthpiece and goatee particles.  The Bulls have been organizationally posterized, now only capable of reflecting the greatness of today's champions.