The countdown commences: #FireGarPax will happen … eventually
The stupidest trade in Bulls history — flipping Jimmy Butler for flotsam — will kill their toxic front office pairing of GarPax. Eventually.
On a normal NBA team, your all-world superstar at the peak of his powers isn’t flipped for pennies on the dollar, especially not before his horrible coach or middling front office are punished for their ineptitude. But we’re not talking about a normal NBA team.
We’re talking about the Chicago Bulls, an organization fast becoming synonymous with cronyism and laziness. Jerry Reinsdorf’s severe apathy has only increased in his dotage. The Bulls have a small group of front office talent appraisers, smaller than most apparently, and they’re almost all connected to Gar Forman’s Iowa State days or are a blood relative of John Paxson or Reinsdorf himself.
The big element of this whole Jimmy Butler trade that this particular PAE scribe takes specific umbrage with, though, is the idea that a team with Butler as the top option was doomed to failure. We never really saw what that team could be.
Jimmy Butler deserved a team that fit
The closest thing to that was the final Tom Thibodeau year (2014-15) where Butler was clearly the best player on the Bulls, and the team was one embarrassing ref non-call away from a 3-1 advantage over the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2015 Eastern Conference Semifinals.
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In Game 4, with 9.4 seconds left on the shot clock and the Cavaliers in possession of the ball, tied up 84-84 with the Bulls, then-Cavaliers head coach David Blatt erroneously called a timeout with no timeouts remaining before being reeled back in by Ty Lue “before” any of the three refs could see him. A timeout call with no timeouts remaining would have given the Bulls possession and the free-throw game would have commenced. At home, the Bulls deserved that call.
That team clearly had its own problems. Pau Gasol was a horrible defender by that point and was unwilling to sublimate his ego for the good of the Bulls by either coming off the bench or being left off the floor late in games. Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler occasionally let the Bulls’ offense stagnate into iso-ball. The team was too slow and lacked athleticism in all non-Jimmy Butler/Derrick Rose positions. Chicago lacked wing depth in both defense and shooting. Rather than address those issues, Paxson and Forman just fired Thibodeau. Aside from adding Bobby Portis, the Fred Hoiberg-coached Bulls did not change one iota. And that team, one year older and hence more injury-prone, limped its way to a 42-40 record and a ninth-place finish in the East.
The Bulls actually overachieved during that 50-win season in Thibodeau’s final year, but their front office was too stubborn to acknowledge it, so blinded were they by their weird Thibs hate.
Dumb offseason additions compounded the trouble
Cut to the summer of 2016.
Rather than add the “younger and more athletic” pieces that Gar Forman promised, the Bulls signed two new past-their-prime ball stoppers who can’t shoot from deep — Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo — to ridiculously inflated contracts.
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They also added a bunch of young pieces who were certainly younger, but absolutely not more athletic. Defensive-minded center Robin Lopez was probably the Bulls’ best 2016 offseason addition. As a lumbering 7-footer with no outside shooting, RoLo’s a virtual dinosaur in today’s NBA. Jimmy Butler proved that he could be the best player on an ill-fitting 50-win team, a team that could have easily gone to the NBA Finals in 2015 (and lost in six games to the Golden State Warriors).
Just imagine what he could do, coming off a career year, when equipped with a team constructed around him. That team would comprise multi-positional shooters who were at least competent defenders and under 30 years old. And it’s never quite the team he got in Chicago.
We never really got to see what he could do in an optimal Bulls situation. Pretending that we know what the ceiling was for a hypothetical, non-existent Bulls team is foolish and short-sighted. We’ll see the team he deserves in Minnesota. And they might win 55 games.
All eyes on thee, GarPax
All that being said, I have one reason to be optimistic now that this deal has gone through. This trade, awful as it is, will expose just how bad John Paxson and Gar Forman are at their jobs. It stands to prove, once and for all, that GarPax have no idea how to run an NBA team. Jerry Reinsdorf prioritized these two disengaged hacks over a slew of All-Stars and basketball common sense. These two hoops philistines will continue to lazily scout and draft one-dimensional players, just as they have since their one good national scout, Matt Lloyd, left after the 2011 season.
They will continue to dumbly overpay old veteran players they watched in the playoff several years ago. They will keep stubbornly negotiating against their young players if those young players turn out to actually be good and are up for rich extensions in restricted free agency, further cultivating an atmosphere of bad feeling.
Next: Per Sun-Times, Gar Forman lied to Jimmy Butler before trade
Maybe they’ll draft raw, high-level talent once or twice, accidentally. But once or twice won’t be enough to field a playoff contender. After five years of horrible, non-playoff squads, Jerry Reinsdorf (or his heirs) will finally, mercifully fire GarPax … about a decade too late.