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.

Deadlines

For the past week, the Bulls have sat on a detonator as the potential catalysts for a blockbuster trade that could have blown a dent in the inevitable LeBron James romp to the NBA Finals.  They could have sent Jimmy Butler to Boston for a mix of players and draft picks that everyone decided to start referring to as "assets" awhile back when basketball executives all became spreadsheet-monger MBAs that speak in TED Talk dialects instead of grizzled scouts and former players who based personnel decisions on phrenology.

The Celtics could have used Butler to join scoring dynamo Isaiah Thomas and an armada of interchangeable Glue Guy wing players to try to finally stop a hobbled Cavs team.  The Bulls would then begin to rebuild, fortified by at least one of the Brooklyn Nets draft picks ceded to the Celtics for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett after a vomiting Nate Robinson had heroically vanquished them from the playoffs.  The trade did not take place.  The Bulls were not satisfied with the offer, and Butler will remain a Bull, heroically attempting to drag the carcass of this shambling basketball wreck to the playoffs.

In the end, the Bulls made a trade.  They sent stalwart Taj Gibson, Doug McDermott and their 2018 second-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Cameron Payne, Anthony Morrow, and Joffrey Lauvergne. 

I don't know anything about Taj Gibson even though he had been on the Bulls longer than anyone on the team.  Gibson came in off the bench for most of his career, played excellent defense, sank some baseline jumpers, and stayed upright through the endless maelstrom of Bulls bullshit; he was there when John Paxson allegedly throttled Vinny Del Negro, when Rose blew out his knee and then kept returning as a faded, ghoulish specter of himself, when the front office waged an insane war against Tom Thibodeau of such beguiling complexity that it climaxed in accusations of office bugging, when the entire team turned against each other in an elaborate Instagram-fueled civil war, when the Bulls went from an exciting contender to a bizarre wasteland of bricked shots where everyone yells at each other all of the time.  Gibson remained a staid, steady presence, only occasionally breaking out to dunk someone into a coffin and then unhinge his jaw and bellow into the United Center rafters to the approval of a roaring crowd and a roaring Carlos Boozer who spent five years on the Bulls screaming more or less continuously.

This Gibson dunk on Wade from 2011 was 
so vicious that Wade plotted to leave the Heat 
under acrimonious circumstances five years 
later, inexplicably join the Bulls, and begin a 
devious sabotage campaign that only looks 
like a hall-of-famer marooned on a mediocre, 
dysfunctional team coached by a Dairy Queen 
night manager

The trade marks the end of the Doug McDermott Era of Chicago Bulls basketball.  The Bulls gave up an absurd haul of picks to move up and select him even though he had some red flags: poor combine numbers, the inability to play basketball without a t-shirt.   McDermott never justified the price, and played at times like a fringe rotation player; nevertheless he was the Bulls' most important player as Gar Forman seemed to want to remake the team in his image.  They cast McDermott as the solution to their offensive woes under Tom Thibodeau, where the Bulls attempted to move the ball on the air currents generated by Thibodeau's horase hollering.  They fired Thibodeau and brought in Fred Hoiberg to run an Iowa Offense. Everything McDermott did was at least interesting, whether it was inexplicably catching fire to continue the Bulls' hilarious winning streak against the Raptors or defending by chasing opposing shooters down like Clint Eastwood attempting to stop his partner from being shot in a haunting flashback.  We will miss McDermott, who will flourish standing in a corner while four opponents swarm Russell Westbrook while futilely calling for the ball.

The centerpiece of the Bulls-Thunder trade is Cameron Payne.  Payne is only 22, but coming off a broken foot and one of the statistically worst seasons of any NBA player this season. The acquisition of Payne, who joins a bloated backcourt of identically flawed young guards remains a mystery; the Bulls now exist as a mystical, ten-armed guard that cannot shoot with any of them.  Perhaps Payne, a former lottery pick, can flourish outside of the shadow of Russell Westbrook.  Perhaps they favored him because his former college coach Steve Prohm happens to be the man who took Fred Hoiberg's old job at Iowa State, which seems like a dumb theory until you remember that Iowa State now exists as a shadowy Pynchonian institution in the minds of a certain species of internet Bulls fans that keeps popping up in everything surrounding the team until a conspiracy either reveals itself or drives them to madness.

After several letters to Iowa State returned unopened, Stan 
from Glen Ellyn came home to a ransacked apartment. 
The giant, red bird sat on his stained recliner, feet-claws 
propped on the ottoman, smoking a pipe from a tiny hole 
bored into the middle of its fabric teeth. He handed me a 
card. It said "Dr. Splad Halfnelson, Iowa State Department 
of Basketball Conspiracy." "The first thing you need to know 
is that this whole thing is because of the perversity. The 
freaks," he said.

Both Morrow and Lauvergne are expiring contracts and likely have no future with the Bulls or American organized basketball.  Morrow's three point shooting has fallen below 30%, which makes him as effective as a kickboxer coming off a leg amputation.  Lauvergne, a sweet-shooting French big man, has the rebounding and shotblocking prowess of a muzzled Tyrannosaurus.

The trade raises more questions that it answers.  The Bulls currently exist as Jimmy Butler and a scaffolding of declining veterans and young players that seem headed to the Adriatic League without some sort of holy revelation about jumpshooting.  They may eventually decide to deal Butler this summer, sell off any player with some value, and plunge the team into the inevitable morass of basketball misery in hopes of landing another star in the draft. But this trade, and the multifarious draft misses, inept trades, and constant atmosphere of intrigue that surrounds the front office leaves little hope for the future no matter what path they take.

POSSESSED

Russian literature is filled with madmen, half-understood outbursts at receptions, and enigmatic grudges, and that is just the academic literature conventions.  That impression comes from The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman's celebration of Russian writers coupled with a memoir of travel to Moscow and Uzbekistan interwoven with digressions on ice palaces and Tolstoy murder conspiracy.    
The largest chunk of the book involves a summer spent in an intense Uzbek-language course in Samarkand.  She has two instructors: a philosophy graduate student who teaches from a Soviet textbook "exclusively through the lens of cotton production: a valuable lesson in monomania" and an Old Uzbek literature professor who disseminated poems, fables, and history.  "Shaking her head sorrowfully, she told me that Genghis Khan did not only ride a bull, but he didn't wear any pants.  She said that God should forgive her for mentioning such things to me, 'but he didn't wear any pants.'"

In another chapter, Batuman travels to Moscow to write an article on the reconstruction of the House of Ice as part of a St. Petersburg's White Days.  Empress Ioannova had ordered the construction of the ice palace in 1740 as part of a festival that would culminate with the forced wedding of two jesters in her court.  Armed guards compelled the couple to spend the night in the frozen palace, dancing and running around in order to stay warm.  The House of Ice featured functioning ice cannons, ice furniture, ice logs in an ice fireplace, and a water-spouting ice elephant, a dedication to ice so elaborate that even Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze character would suggest that they maybe cool it with the ice before sadly realizing that the ice puns had so colonized his thoughts that he had no choice but to surrender to his greatest enemy, room temperature.

Reproduction of the House of Ice in St. Petersburg in 2006.  
Why did the Russian government decide to pay tribute to 
a former monarch's insanely elaborate lark to freeze her 
subjects?  According to Batuman, "[Valery] Gromov, a 
former army management official, and [Svetlana] 
Mikheyeyeva, a former doctor and healthcare manager, 
had conceived of this dream during an international 
management training program in Tokyo in 1999, where 
they ended up stuck in a broken elevator with the chairman 
of the Association of Russian Snow, Ice, and Sand Sculptors."

The Possessed on its surface is a hard sell: come for the exploration of Girardian memetic theory in Dostoevksy and stay for negotiations about artifact captions at an academic Isaac Babel conference, but it all works because Batuman is a wonderful writer and brilliantly funny.  Batuman depicts the academic world of literature as absurd and even grotesque while never dampening her own underlying argument about the resonance and vitality of the books and authors she loves.

DEADLINE TO SELECTION

Northwestern followed a panicky home win against Rutgers with a demoralizing loss to Illinois. The Chicago Tribune consulted some Certified Bracketologists who tell us that they are still ok, that one more win should finally put them in the dang Tournament, that the State Farm Center ceiling has not caved in and brought ruin to the season, but my default setting remains tournament-related panic. Still, there is nothing to do but hope they can beat a reeling Hoosier squad, that all the other bubble teams shamefully collapse on their home courts in front of wailing fans, and that the Wildcats won't be exiled to the NIT or an exotic alternative tournament in an ice palace.