The Chicago Bulls Front Office: A profile in courage
You know who’s a real American hero? Chicago Bulls general manager Gar Forman, that’s who.
AND YOU KNOW WHO ELSE IS A HERO?
John Paxson, that’s who else!
These courageous patriots had the gumption to make their team a little worse just in time for a postseason push. Let’s stand up and give them a round, eh?
On Episode 180 of the Bill Simmons Podcast (at 23:22 to be precise), The Ringer’s head honcho had a telling anecdote about the Bulls’ somehow still-employed GM, that more or less tells you all you need to know about the guy who calls the shots for Chicago’s front office, in tandem with John Paxson, Michael Reinsdorf and Jerry Reinsdorf. A lot of cooks in the kitchen.
Here’s the story (condensed for length):
"We went to [Oakland] do the [Kevin] Durant podcast two weeks ago, and on the way home Gar Forman was on my flight. And this was at … noon the day after the Warriors completely annihilated [the Bulls], as the trade deadline was getting near, and the flight was about an hour and 20 minutes … he slept the entire time. And I was like, ‘It all makes sense.’ … I thought he should be on Go-Go Air … like on the trade machine, just coming up with ideas. Nope. Long nap for Gar. I swear to God that happened."
Okay, sure, the Bulls just wrapped up their first four-game win streak this season.
And yes, that included beating the Cleveland Cavaliers and Phoenix Suns on back-to-back nights, with impressive performances from Denzel Valentine and Nikola Mirotic, to go along with good nights from Dwyane Wade and Jimmy Butler.
But, Phoenix’s 18-42 overall record (including a miserable 8-24 road record) is dead last in the Western Conference, and Cleveland was without their best and third-best players during the Bulls’ dubious victory. A win is a win, yes, but darn it, they could’ve won with Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott, too. I’m not loving the fact that Butler is logging big minutes in bunches (Butler is averaging 38.9 minutes per game since the trade), plus being down a little depth sans McDermott (prove me wrong, Anthony Morrow or Denzel Valentine).
Anyway, let’s get into it.
Last Thursday at the trade deadline, the Bulls sent Taj Gibson, Doug McDermott and a 2018 second-round draft pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder in exchange for Cameron Payne, who is shooting 32.9 percent from the field and boasts one of the worst PER’s in the league (this side of Rookie of the Year Paul Zipser, of course), the Ghost Of Anthony Morrow and A 6’11 Guy Who Averages 0.1 Blocks Per Game.
Again, Taj Gibson was by far the Bulls’ second-best defender. BY FAR.
(Sorry RoLo, you’re just not that good.)
Cameron Payne, meanwhile, doesn’t defend particularly well. Or, you know, shoot very well. Or penetrate very well.
Okay, fine, Payne holds a career average of 5.2 assists per 36 minutes, but because he can’t do much else, he has yet to get on an NBA floor nearly enough to actually play for that long during real, meaningful games. And this putz might be the Bulls’ starting point guard any day now!
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It’s nice to see Gibson (and to a lesser extent, the underwhelming McDermott) join a legitimate playoff team as opposed to the bottom-feeding Eastern Conference pseudo-playoff team that Chicago has become with an MVP contender, aspiring for a top-four seed in the hyper-competitive Western Conference. That said, I don’t see the additions of Gibson and McDermott being enough to actually get the Thunder anywhere this year unless Kevin Durant never comes back from that knee injury, and one of the All Stars on each of the Spurs, Clippers and Rockets goes down.
In Gibson, the Thunder have added a really solid defensive power forward with decent mid-range offensive touch, although right now he’s playing behind freakin’ Domantas Sabonis.
In McDermott, they have the player Anthony Morrow used to be, albeit at a more useful position: a horrible defender who just happens to be a knockdown shooter. Considering that Joffrey Lauvergne was the Thunder’s only consistent rotation player in the deal (Payne only logged 20 games played with OKC this season as he struggled with foot issues), the Thunder have definitely worked to shore up their depth.
But, they still need way more shooting, and a better second creator than Victor Oladipo to take some of the stress off the aforementioned MVP contender Russell Westbrook.
The counterargument is that, fine, John Paxson or Gar Forman wanted to off-load Taj and get worse because they didn’t want the 31-year-old power forward to walk in free agency this summer for nothing, the way Pau Gasol did last season. Why the heck did the Bulls have to include a second-round pick in the deal? Any sane person would have just walked away from the trade, but Chicago was clearly blinded by a desperation to get something, anything, in return for the expiring Gibson contract.
What this all comes down to is that the four-headed Bulls brain trust has absolutely no idea what the heck they want to do with this basketball team, and so they’ve decided to twiddle their thumbs for a few years while they figure it out. Or something. Those four folks are former dynasty-era hero Paxson, Forman, the current owner of Fred Hoiberg’s former house, and White Sox owners Michael and Jerry Reinsdorf (oh, right, they own the Bulls too — they keep forgetting).
Yes, the primary two additions, Lauvergne and Payne, continue the Bulls’ youth movement. And John Paxson, by way of retroactive apology, claimed that the Bulls made the deal to free up playing time for Denzel Valentine (who might be decent one day) and Bobby Portis (who won’t).
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But it’d be nice if the Bulls had, oh, a competent coach to develop all these young players our front office is adding. Instead, we have Fred Hoiberg, a coach who has trouble communicating with his roster and has been caught lying about rotation decisions.
In some ridiculous and completely tone-deaf comments last Thursday, John Paxson made it clear that he’s hell-bent on flipping Jimmy Butler and completely obsessed with a five-year-old ACL tear. Does he not realize that Jimmy Butler is a better two-way player than Derrick Rose ever was? Instead of giving Butler a decent team ever since it became apparent that Butler was an All-Star-caliber player, Pax is slowly defanging it? Paxson is nuts to want to trade a player that even he concedes is “a top 10 or top 12 player in this league.”
Why not build a team around him? Why not at least try? This summer, outside of adding Dwyane Wade (who more or less was a lucky 11th-hour free agent addition), the Bulls blew ungodly sums of money on backup point guard Rajon Rondo, instead of just retaining the far superior ex-Bull E’Twaun Moore for half of Rondo’s price tag and flipped Derrick Rose and Justin Holiday (who, as a high-level three-point shooter, was exactly the kind of player who should have been retained) for the slow-as-molasses Robin Lopez and Jerian Grant.
Butler, Wade and Gibson were the Bulls’ three good players. Instead of bringing in reinforcements, Paxson and Forman have constructed a house of straw around Butler and Wade. Everyone outside of the front office (who really don’t want to build “around” Jimmy, but rather “with” Jimmy, whatever the f— that distinction means), every Bulls pundit, blogger and fan ranting and raving into cyberspace, knows what Jimmy Butler needs: shooters and athletes.
At 35, Wade may see his production fall off a cliff next season. He’s been pretty darn good this year! Not an All-Star perhaps, but a very solid shooting guard. Though Wade isn’t a piece to build with, he’d be a great role-playing second- or third-banana on a contending team. To squander a year of his time with this nonsense is unfair to the Hall of Famer and his legions of Chicago fans. It’s kind of offensive, really.
To be fair, Gar Forman had absolutely no idea how to do that, and it seems like he’s the idiot to blame for a lot of the Bulls’ dumb roster moves. This sucks. It seems like the Bulls are definitely gonna try to do a full rebuild this summer, ditching Jimmy Butler, letting Dwyane Wade walk, and restocking with a bunch of youth and un-helpful Celtics role players. And, uh, they haven’t drafted a good player since 2011.
John Paxson’s nefarious, not-so-secret scheme would appear to be letting these Bulls miss the playoffs (which may be tough to do in a middling Eastern Conference), blaming Jimmy and then convincing the Reinsdorfs and Forman to let a Boston or a trade with the Los Angeles Lakers happen once they know who has what pick.
Waiting to flip Jimmy until the summer against now is smart (even though I’m opposed to them moving Butler at all, because he’s so damn good and he’s on a reasonable contract now, since it was a maximum deal before the salary cap ballooned in 2016).
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That said, undermining his team in the mean time is dumb. Why not help the Bulls a bit and see what Butler can do? I have no idea.