It was a week of good news for Michael Reinsdorf and the rest of the management and ownership team for the Chicago Bulls. After a year sinking all the way to the depths of the league, grabbing the coveted No. 14 pick in the NBA draft, Chicago lost one more game this year than last year, but strategically placed themselves back in the playoffs.
If anyone has been bothering to read my work throughout the year, you may have noticed that I have been highly critical of the organization. Some people didn’t appreciate that. Well, guess what – it’s not all bad!
It was an exciting final week of the regular season, Chicago winning the last two games of the year over the Orlando Magic and Brooklyn Nets to secure a playoff spot on the last night of the season. And yes, the Bulls are back in the playoffs!
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Unsurprisingly, Jimmy Butler was No. 8 in jersey sales and Chicago was No. 3 in merchandise sales. The cash cow has more milk, Mikey Reinsdorf! The team remains popular and has a large fan base. And yes, they lost a trade, lost a year of Butler and lost more games than last year.
That can all go away for Gar Forman and John Paxson. All they need is for this team to push Boston to six or seven games in the first round of the playoffs and, then, they just take a shallow breath, sigh, and hold an impromptu end of season press conference that runs past beat writer deadlines and bam! It’s just like the good old days of… last season. But, you know, with playoffs.
The Bulls did show some fight and the team did come together at the end of the season. Nikola Mirotic checked a calendar and noticed it was March, Rajon Rondo played like a man with a big payday on the line, and Jimmy caught his second-wind.
There’s a handful of recent good things, and we will get those soon, but for today, we want to look at a few of the biggest disappointments of the 2016-17 Chicago Bulls season.