Plan C (or D? or E?): Go Young.

They had their potentially young team when Rose was drafted, then they fucked it all up by firing VDN and letting Gordon (and soon to be Thomas) walk. I think they just need SOMETHING at this point. Joe Johnson is overpaid at the max, but so what? He’s good, we need any kind of good players.

At that point with him making the max and Deng already at $11-$12m, and extensions for Noah and Rose coming up, the Bulls will never be contenders unless they pay the tax. But that’s likely the case always. But they’ve already proven they can’t commit to developing young talent, so they have to overpay for someone elses.

Steve Nash is making a pretty solid argument that the success of the Sun’s was not at all tied to the coach. It was just tied to letting Nash do whatever he wants.

he can take a bad team and make them mediocore or good, thats what superstar talent can do.

Just as a thought experiment, is it better to spend $96M on Joe Johnson for 5 years (Age 29-33) or $96M on Rudy Gay and David Lee (Ages 24-28 and 27-31)?

If you think about it, it’s really a no brainer to go with the two younger guys.

1. Guys like this are lower risk. They’re young, seem healthy, and project to be productive throughout their contracts. In this sense, they’re sort of no-brainers in the sense that Gordon and Deng (if he had an insurable back) were. With Johnson, the likelihood is you’ve got significant drop off in the latter years of his deal, this hurts whether you’ve still got him on the team or whether you try to trade him ,because you find you can’t get crap for him.

2. You’re getting two for the price of one. And the Bulls have two obvious holes to fill. Johnson is a much riskier proposition in the since that the Bulls have to be that much better at evaluating talent to plug the other big hole (at PF). If you go with Johnson, you have to strike gold in the draft or free agency or trade to fill the PF spot. In addition to the rest of your roster. That’s a lot to ask of any team, but really a lot to ask of the Bulls.

With Lee and Gay (for example), in many ways you’ve got a much higher floor. You know you’re going to get solid production from all five positions. You’ve got more eggs in more baskets. You’ve got more possibilities to make a reasonable trade down the road and still have enough left to get somewhere. You’re less reliant on luck.

In short, the Bulls shouldn’t delude themselves and as fans we shouldn’t. We’re not a player away. We’re probably not even two players away, but two players gets us closer than one at twice the price unless that guy is just absurdly good. And Johnson is not that guy. He’s closer, in terms of the kind of player he is, to a healthy Deng or Gordon, than to Lebron or Wade or, maybe, Bosh.

1. Wallace did improve the team his first year. The Bulls big problem was not trying to capitalize on that (short) window of opportunity. They absolutely should have spent more. Or, alternatively, they should absolutely not have spent the money on Wallace. By making the moves they made, they put one foot in the boat and kept another on the pier.

2. “Real damage” sounds like a euphemism for “fuck all in the grand scheme of things”. The Bulls team with Wallace, I guess, also did “real damage”. It doesn’t help anything in the long run, except to fuck up our cap and end up leading to the departure of young talent while we paid off the remainder of contractual shells like Jerome James and Tim Thomas.

3. The Celtics, in fact, had quite a useful set of depth guys when they actually won the title. Posey, Brown, Cassell, Powe, and House all played important minutes for them in the playoffs.

So lets examine that difference
1- Rondo, Cassell
2- Allen, House
3- Pierce, Posey
4- Garnett, Powe
5- Perkins, Brown

That team played 10 deep in the playoffs, and has three, possibly four hall of fame players in the starting lineup. And recall it didn’t have an easy ride through the playoffs. They played two seven game series.

How do the Bulls stack up there?

1- Rose, Hinrich
2- Johnson,
3- Deng, JJ
4- Gibson
5- Noah

OK, this team is starting Taj Gibson. Now, I think it might be fair to roughly equate Joe Johnson and Rose to Pierce and Allen if Rose develops and Johnson doesn’t drop off. So that puts us on par with the Celtics if, I guess, you put Deng somewhere in the same zip code as KG. But I don’t.

And while I put Noah in the same vicinity as Perkins and Hinrich in the same vicinity as Posey, it’s pretty laughable to say Gibson is anything remotely close to the kind of player Rondo is. And we’ve got nobody after that, whereas the Celts could bring in tested guys like Cassell and Brown for short stings.

I point all this out to show just how far we are from the Celtics’ “model” of how they one. They are, in fact, a good template for how to put together a team. But this team is nowhere close, and blowing our load on Joe Johnson will still leave us nowhere close, while using up all our appreciable means of closing the gap. In short, it’s fool’s gold.

Oh wait, Danny Ainge and Danny Ferry have both shown they are willing to go for broke and put their jobs on the line to satisfy their franchise players.

Assuming Rose becomes a top 5 guard and the rest of the team plays swimmingly is as ludicrous as thinking the other teams are just going to fall off a cliff because they get old.

Management let Vinny w/ a horrible bench, and Vinny can’t reall coach and proves it time after time.

I forgot that Bayless was mentioned here, I thought you were just some BEdger rubbing your talent all over our faces.