Picture a world where Fred Hoiberg gets Jahlil Okafor and the Chicago Bulls send out Jimmy Butler with both teams swapping first round picks. Who starts for the team and what happens to Rajon Rondo?
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On or before the February trade deadline, the Chicago Bulls may be an entirely different team.
In any case, Fred Hoiberg needs to take charge for real and use his best players for the roles they were drafted for. No babysitting anyone just so they can look good even if the entire pace-and-space Hoiball shoot and attack system is compromised for a slower offense that runs out of gas in the fourth. That means setting Nikola Mirotic and Doug McDermott as the lead scorers with Dwyane Wade playing off them. With Okafor onboard, the ball dumped into the paint is a sure score. Watch the video below and observe how quick Okafor can put the ball in the hoop compared to current Chicago frontcourt.
The Bulls must get used to the one truth in the NBA going into the playoffs–every possession counts. It is what made Phil Jackson’s triangle offense so ahead of its time. Look for the easiest opportunity to score and dump the ball to that guy. Hoiberg’s modification of the triangle with movement traps and walk-up threes as well as inside-outside passing traps, where a Bulls center could excel if paired with a guard, slashing wing or tall shooter. It’s why the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated a Golden State Warriors team that got lulled into waiting for lapses to push their 3-point spurts. Score with every possession using a Hoiball system and everything else becomes easier. And the Bulls have already shown they can do it, if they have a reliable scorer.
If Chicago executes a trade to move one of their core pieces or acquire some new talent, the starting team may be Robin Lopez at center, McDermott at wing, Mirotic at power forward, Michael Carter-Williams at point guard, and Wade at the shooting guard.
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The second unit works off a secondary center acquired before the trade deadline, Cristiano Felicio at power forward, Paul Zipser or Bobby Portis at wing, Rondo at point guard, and Jerian Grant or Isaiah Canaan at the shooting guard.
The most promising aspect of Hoiball from the games where the Bulls blow their opponents out is that the team jumpstarts to keep a big lead so that any slacking off in the fourth quarter is buffered by that enormous lead. The team has done scoring big quarters with 34 to 38 points and doing the same again in the second half. They only need to get into rhythm to score big by moving the ball around and finding the easy score. Watch how McDermott, when set into rhythm by passing to him when he is in a position to score, puts the ball into the hoop in under three seconds, then think hard and well how both him and either a current center or a player acquired at the deadline, like Okafor, could work well off pick-and-pop or pick-and-dive plays.
Quick sets and beastly scoring in the paint with Okafor inside and McDermott hitting from outside. That could free Lopez to handle defensive and offensive rebounder chores, or screen like Joakim Noah for the shooters. That’s a very big screen who can pop and pass over the defense into Okafor or Felicio if the Bulls play big. Ditto for Denzel Valentine, Dougie and Nikola.
Keep Rondo on the team to guarantee a playoff run that will be worth the Jimmy trade and be the raison d’etre for keeping Rondo for next year and maybe the rest of his career. Because he watches out for the young guys.
It also gives the Bulls more cachet to play strong inside the paint with McDermott over smaller defenders or Mirotic cutting and Lopez or another big finding them and conversely, Mirotic and McBuckets finding the center diving to the rim.
Now, that will be fun to watch than the current lineup with Butler playing ISO for 50 something games and realizing too late that it takes 1-through-15 and more than ISO all the time to win in this generation of the NBA. Rondo has been through all that and so has Wade. If the Bulls move Jimmy it will be for the better.
Wade will have more of the Miami Heat inside-outside game with him and a big working together instead of him and Jimmy overlapping roles and clogging the lane.
The role of the remaining guards will be to implement Fred Hoiberg’s system to the letter. Even DNP-CD regular Canaan will be an important cog in this system because passing becomes a rhythm thing for shots and not as a last second resort to bail oneself out of a failed ISO. Once the guards get into rhythm, everything falls into place.