NBA resumption likely won’t include the Chicago Bulls

Basketball is coming back, but the Chicago Bulls likely aren’t.

Late Wednesday morning, ESPN NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski dropped the Woj bomb we’ve all been waiting to see:

The plan includes 13 Western Conference teams and nine Eastern Conference teams, eight regular-season games, a possible play-in tournament for the eighth seed, and playoffs, sources said.

The top 16 teams in the Eastern and Western conferences will be joined by teams currently within six games of eighth place in the two conferences — New Orleans, Portland, San Antonio, Sacramento, Phoenix and Washington, sources said.

The play-in tournament will include the No. 8 and No. 9 teams — if the ninth seed finishes the regular season within four games of the eighth, sources said. In that case, the No. 8 seed enters a double-elimination tournament and the No. 9 seed a single-elimination tournament, sources said.

Of course, the Chicago Bulls are on the outside looking in.

Which, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic, several players and staffers were cool with.

Based on a quick glance at the Twitter timeline, it looks like most fans were also cool with the Bulls not getting to restart the season.

The hiatus since the season stalled due to COVID-19 has been all about a fresh start for this franchise. Guys who have made key organizational decisions for over a decade have been cast behind the curtain in favor of fresh new faces in charge.

Nobody wanted to start the Marc Eversley/Arturas Karnisovas era with a reboot of an already-failed season. And very few people wanted to see Jim Boylen coach another game for the Bulls. Restarting the season with Boylen as coach would have stalled some momentum with this new era of Bulls basketball.

Let the new leadership settle in, reformulate the roster, make some changes to the coaching staff, and reboot for a hopefully much-improved 2020-2021 season.

Although it’s going to suck to be without Bulls basketball for so long, it’s still probably a better alternative than trying to resuscitate the current season that is already dead.