I like to be glass half full with my beloved Bulls (I even think the pre-trading-deadline Bulls could have been built into something before AK trashed it ALL). I LIKE Billy from his Providence days, great player competing in the REAL Big East with John Thompson Hoyas, Carneseca St. John's etc). Seems like a good, smart guy. Loves coaching.
I can see how he'd fit into a first-rate coach/FO combo, you just need the right FO person to team with him. PLUS: he needs to want to WIN, not pull in a salary, keep his wife in style-accustomed, and get his son a job. The best coaches are often psychos. Pop being the best example of cool guy, with great FO sidekick, who wasn't Mazulla or Udoka. Billy as head coach could fit that mold. Hasn't yet though.
We'll see...but the Bulls are worlds' better off today than they were a few days ago :)
Is it possible that AKME executed the multi-day, uncharacteristic, trade deadline firesale without the Reinsdorf's noticing, giving their approval, or directing them to do it? I didn't watch the press conference.
I’m pretty sure that AKME were hamstrung by management constraints (no tanking but keep the payroll down) - which doesn’t bode well for the future - but even from that perspective their incompetence was staggering.
Yeah, I know that saying the situation is not salvageable seems lame, but that is the reality of the ownership. They evaluate the Bulls exclusively by current profits and not by future evaluation. Which is insanse since they have been coasting off of the fumes of the Jordan era for the better part of three decades.
So it is not just that they are outmoded in the sport departments. They are financially obsolete. They do weird shit like insisting on cost neutral acquisitions (you can waive Rondo but you have to sell a 2nd rounder) that are impossible constraints in the running of an organization of this size.
And it is not just JR, though his fingerprints are on all of this. The ownership group are dinosaurs with few external sources of wealth who want PASSSIVE income, and milking the Bulls is a dream come true for them.
So, no, nothing will change. Do not follow this team if you want basketball. All they offer you is the grim enjoyment of organizational failure and the decaying rich chaining the rest of us to their tired existences.
Yeah, the whole “nothing will change because the Reinsdorfs still own the team” argument is starting to feel lazy to me.
It’s possible to build a good team with a crap owner. The Knicks have recently done it. The Bulls did it themselves in the early 2010s.
And they’re clearly not going to sell. I wish they would, but they won’t. So we have to just hope Michael gets it together and starts recognizing his faults.
If he doesn’t learn, then we’ll be back here having this same discussion in a few years.
i thought that was always one of the biggest sticking points on the derrick teams, getting him a real scoring 2, and whether not doing so was organizational negligence/being cheap, or incompetence; i.e. bogans being "good for the team", and eventually relying on a good but perpetually injured richard hamilton.
I don't care, that was the factor whether you beat LeBron or not, and possibly kept derrick's knee from exploding by lessening the need for his constant usage.
it was a little of both, the cheapness limited their options. They famously have the ridiculous strategy of 'paying *after* they're a contender', so when Derrick got hurt they immediately tore down the team. ultimately 'correct' in a cost/benefit way, but still extremely shitty. We have no way of knowing if they would've felt that team was worth spending on.
I am banging my head against a wall. I wrote a much longer post about Billy Donovan’s playoff failures, but it felt too pessimistic. I think he can coach successfully in the regular season but he has failed in the playoffs/play-in every year. He gets outcoached. Maybe that’s okay as a placeholder, but the FO is literally revolving the search around him. This guy has NO reason to have that type of job security and any other team in the league would’ve moved on by now.
I have hope Michael cares more about the Bulls than his father, but this is astounding incompetence from the jump. However even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. Hopefully basketball Jesus will have some mercy on us.
Years ago i sent an email to the bulls venting and was so surprised to get a response from Mike (or his handler). Either way, i appreciate the fact he seemed to care. Now we will see.. I’m giving him 3 years to see if he can fix this mess
That’s fair, because only a Michael Scott esque owner would think it makes sense to talk about how tanking it bad while ALSO talking about how the Bulls could have drafted Cooper Flagg if they only lost one more game while ALSO not recognizing that point isn’t even really accurate.
I neglected to mention that I don't believe Reinsdorf said 'NBA Title' once. They're clearly not a championship level organization so why lie I guess? I'm just hoping they are a 'make the conference finals' and not 'get the 6th seed' kind of benchmark
One hot take I'm thinking about is that the various guys who have been around forever and get paid to do nothing (headed by Paxson) probably don't want Donovan to get control because there's a good chance he'll just stop or dramatically reduce their checks and divert that money to guys that actually do something.
That would explain why Michael comes out and, in the same press conference, says he and Paxson and former Iowa State bagman Brian Hagen will be running the search along with hired consultants (lol). And then, in the next breath says that he hasn't actually talked to Billy Donovan, but would certainly strongly consider turning the whole organization over to him.
That suggests to me that in addition to Michael being a hopeless fop, there are two ways this could go, and the dreary old entitlement crew is pushing for one direction and Michael seems to have the (correct) instinct that he needs to cut the cord, but also has the (incorrect) instinct to do whatever the last person he talked to suggested he do.
maybe, that puts some ambition - even the backstabbing kind - on Paxson that I'm not sure he has. I suppose if his gravy train is threatened, but I think Donovan is more in 'old dreary' (and catholic school point guard) cohort than against it
I do think it was awful and strange that Paxson is even mentioned. Why, especially if you are saying you're bringing in a search firm too? I think Michael still believes fans idolize Pax like he and his dad do, when in reality he showed his ass to be extremely out of touch with the modern NBA and they supposedly want to get someone who gets that
Man, I'm glad you found some positives because I sure didn't!
1. Using a search firm this time - It may be good, it may be bad; I don't think it's unequivocally good
2. No in-person restrictions from Covid like in 2020 - same as #1. As an international teacher who has interviewed and been hired both online and in person, it's a good and bad thing. I guess it CAN put one person over the top of others, but whoever you actually bring in for in-person interviews should already have been checked out. I don't see how brining AKME in would have revealed his biggest weaknesses - making moves and communicating with the public (not the same as communicating face-to-face)
I read it as an excuse the first time through.
3. Acknowledged an important quality is communication, both internally and externally to the fanbase, and he admitted that Arturas Karnisovas was awful at that - it's important, but it's 10x more important to actually make the right moves. AK could have led the Bulls to championship, and I never would have cared what he said. Conversely, he could have been a great communicator but had all the same moves, and it might have just kept him around longer.
In politics, they talk about whether soemthing is a policy problem or a messaging problem. AKME was clearly both, but if you have mediocre or bad policy, it doesn't actually make things good.
4. Acknowledged that he needs to be less hands-off when something seems blatantly wrong - not sure this is a good thing.
But since this is a Reinsdorf, and these are The Bulls, there were some troubling indications that they’d repeat past mistakes.
1 . John Paxson is still hanging around and Reinsdorf cited him as an influence (gag), and also still around is Gar Forman’s former bag man Brian Hagen. Holdovers from the AKME regime include the lesser Connelly brother and JJ Polk - yes, bad
2. The deference to the incumbent head coach, Billy Donovan - by far the most damning, and goes back to #4 in the previous. He's already putting his thumb on the scale even before the hire a new executive. I want an owner who is less involved, not more.
And I'm still not convinced Billy Donovan is a good to very good NBA coach. He has a career .500 record, and, except for the 1 year he won with the Bulls, he's had a Hall of Famer on every winning team. He was an amazing college coach - but that's a whole "different game". Almost no college coach has gone from successful college coach to successful NBA coach, and I'm not sure Donovan is going to end up as one of the exceptions.
I'll add, if it wasn't obvious, that I think the only way this team gets good is if it gets lucky in hiring the right executive. What li'l 'Dorf said made me think he has absolutely no clue about what makes good basketball and not even what it would take to make a good executive. No talk of the salary cap or winning on the margins, or finding gems, or... just anything other than "talk good" and "don't change coach".
The perfect executive for this team has to be able to:
1. Convince ownership he's not spending too much money
2. Have a great analytics-focused philosophy (whether himself or just wanting to hire the people who do) to achieve #1
3. Know the cap or make sure to hire someone that can do that
4. #2 and #3 yet still be a "good ol' boy" that will convince Michael and Paxson et al. that he's not just a nerd
5. be a tremendous leader who can transform an old, "traditional" front office to a modern, progressive one
6. but not be bothered by having to keep the same coach and having old Paxson and Bagen still in the building (so, somehow transformational but not)
7. All the other things that make a basketball executive great
When I think of constraints by the ownership, I think of #4 and #6. I guarantee that's not what AKME think - in fact, that's probably a couple of areas in which they excelled.
I think this team won't be good because I'm not sure who that person is. It could be a new, younger person who would be willing to put up with some shit to get their first gig, but a) would they still be able to convince Bulls FO that they're good, and b) would they stick around for awhile once they found some success?
Otherwise, I think most of the things I think make a good executive will go by the by in favor of someone who just "clicks" with the owner and Paxson et al.
I think that the most important quality for a Bulls GM is to be insanely competitive.
This is an organization that fundamentally doesn't care about winning basketball games. No GM has ever been fired for failing to make the playoffs or advancing past the first round. It's always about being an embarrassment for the owners, or selling less tickets or something like that.
It's very difficult to do something very well when your boss doesn't care if you do it at all. You need to have a borderline pathological internal motivation for that.
I agree that the search firm and Covid restrictions are not inherently good, it was more that it was different than whatever led them to the AK hire. I didn't intend to put these points in any order of importance
Reinsdorf did go into other qualities besides 'talk good', yes there was the banal 'process oriented' but also he found AK to lack conviction, and that he was also looking for someone who is forward thinking and able to adapt - bringing up how Golden State prepared in advance for the media rights and salary cap explosion. now, 'tanking' is another type of big-brain move that he dismissed, but I think he more believes the hire should be able to figure out the anti-tanking measures. Also, I believe the communication hinderance with AK was not just assuaging the fans, but his discussions with ownership, the rest of the front office, and perhaps most importantly his dealings with other teams. That can hinder 'ability to make good moves'
And I just didn't take the Donovan praise to be that literal that he has to be kept. It was more that he unequivocally thought Donovan was a good coach (you disagree) and any worthwhile hire would agree. I still believe that the right guy could come in and convince both Billy and Michael that Billy shouldn't be coach if it's not the right fit. Now perhaps instead they get duped again by someone promising a quicker fix (and needing a win-now coach), Mike is 0-1 at this so far and I am not assuming he'll improve, just open to the possibility
All of that is "fair," of course. I will say I don't NOT think Donovan is a good coach; I'm just not yet convinced that he is after 9 years of data. For me, that's enough to move on. Even amidst a rebuild and all that, I'm not sure what his overriding philosophy is. Play young guys and development? Play older guys? Play guys with experience who won't mess up - i.e. avoiding negatives?
Anyway, yeah. Who knows? Wanting someone better than AKME is good - and even distinguishing what some of those things are is even better, but as we all agree, that's still a pretty low bar to clear.
As we are at a bit of a milestone, time for the grim exercise of recalling the best and most memorable Bulls moments from the last decade. I have the DeMar scream game, that weird as ceremony where Zach gave a girl a puppy, maybe there was a good Lonzo game in there from the LLVD high water mark? Maybe that 14 and 8 Patrick Williams near double-double? That's all I've got.
I wonder if Donny was one foot out to UNC and junior asked what he could do to keep him and the answer was AKME heads on a platter? Maybe not a guarantee of Donny wanting to stay but rather him taking advantage of the situation. Either he coaches at UNC or he gets rid of his idiot bosses…
I 100% believe this conversation happened. How much Reinsdorf put stock into it, and how much it played into the firing, only he knows. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of his talking points came directly from Donovan. Donovan probably taught him more about basketball and what they need as an executive in a 30-minute conversation than Michael learned the entire rest of his life.
1) It’s important to not forget that Michael a) Doesn’t actually understand the sport and b) Doesn’t have any strong beliefs about team building other than disliking tanking. So anything he says about the current state of the team doesn’t really matter. I know KC reported that the Bulls think they can turn this thing around quickly, but that’s just simply because Michael is an overly optimistic doofus. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to force a GM to build a win now team around Giddey or something like that. Michael has no idea what he actually wants.
2) Teams with bad owners can win as long as they make good hires. It happens in every sport. Hopefully it finally happens with the Bulls.
3) My prediction as of now is that Billy will leave and the Bulls will hire Matt Lloyd. I also think this team will look vastly different sooner than later and there’s a strong chance Matas will be the only current Bull still on the roster 1-2 seasons from now.
Doc Rivers is officially free to terrorize another team. I know it's unlikely and it's the paranoia talking, but his Chicago roots and a Bulls FO that's the right amount of dumb has me a bit nervous.
Olbrich gets the stupidest triple double exactly two years to the day after Sanogo had that 20 point 20 rebound game against the Wizards.
And just like when Bulls fans were screaming for Sanogo to get more playing time because of that one end-of-season game in which the Wizards weren't trying, I'm sure fans will be begging for Olbrich to get more minutes next season because maybe he's the next Jokic!
So happy we don't have to hear an AK press conference trying to list positives from this season, Giddey's arbitrary in-game stat benchmarks would be up there
I like to be glass half full with my beloved Bulls (I even think the pre-trading-deadline Bulls could have been built into something before AK trashed it ALL). I LIKE Billy from his Providence days, great player competing in the REAL Big East with John Thompson Hoyas, Carneseca St. John's etc). Seems like a good, smart guy. Loves coaching.
I can see how he'd fit into a first-rate coach/FO combo, you just need the right FO person to team with him. PLUS: he needs to want to WIN, not pull in a salary, keep his wife in style-accustomed, and get his son a job. The best coaches are often psychos. Pop being the best example of cool guy, with great FO sidekick, who wasn't Mazulla or Udoka. Billy as head coach could fit that mold. Hasn't yet though.
We'll see...but the Bulls are worlds' better off today than they were a few days ago :)
Is it possible that AKME executed the multi-day, uncharacteristic, trade deadline firesale without the Reinsdorf's noticing, giving their approval, or directing them to do it? I didn't watch the press conference.
"That’s clearly a bullshit excuse coming from incompetents who were also voluminous bullshitters."
Not sure I agree. They would have had to actually speak for their bullshit to voluminous.
let's say that the bullshit% per sentence was incredibly efficient
I’m pretty sure that AKME were hamstrung by management constraints (no tanking but keep the payroll down) - which doesn’t bode well for the future - but even from that perspective their incompetence was staggering.
Yeah, I know that saying the situation is not salvageable seems lame, but that is the reality of the ownership. They evaluate the Bulls exclusively by current profits and not by future evaluation. Which is insanse since they have been coasting off of the fumes of the Jordan era for the better part of three decades.
So it is not just that they are outmoded in the sport departments. They are financially obsolete. They do weird shit like insisting on cost neutral acquisitions (you can waive Rondo but you have to sell a 2nd rounder) that are impossible constraints in the running of an organization of this size.
And it is not just JR, though his fingerprints are on all of this. The ownership group are dinosaurs with few external sources of wealth who want PASSSIVE income, and milking the Bulls is a dream come true for them.
So, no, nothing will change. Do not follow this team if you want basketball. All they offer you is the grim enjoyment of organizational failure and the decaying rich chaining the rest of us to their tired existences.
Yeah, the whole “nothing will change because the Reinsdorfs still own the team” argument is starting to feel lazy to me.
It’s possible to build a good team with a crap owner. The Knicks have recently done it. The Bulls did it themselves in the early 2010s.
And they’re clearly not going to sell. I wish they would, but they won’t. So we have to just hope Michael gets it together and starts recognizing his faults.
If he doesn’t learn, then we’ll be back here having this same discussion in a few years.
i thought that was always one of the biggest sticking points on the derrick teams, getting him a real scoring 2, and whether not doing so was organizational negligence/being cheap, or incompetence; i.e. bogans being "good for the team", and eventually relying on a good but perpetually injured richard hamilton.
I don't care, that was the factor whether you beat LeBron or not, and possibly kept derrick's knee from exploding by lessening the need for his constant usage.
obviously this still chaps my ass, ha
it was a little of both, the cheapness limited their options. They famously have the ridiculous strategy of 'paying *after* they're a contender', so when Derrick got hurt they immediately tore down the team. ultimately 'correct' in a cost/benefit way, but still extremely shitty. We have no way of knowing if they would've felt that team was worth spending on.
I am banging my head against a wall. I wrote a much longer post about Billy Donovan’s playoff failures, but it felt too pessimistic. I think he can coach successfully in the regular season but he has failed in the playoffs/play-in every year. He gets outcoached. Maybe that’s okay as a placeholder, but the FO is literally revolving the search around him. This guy has NO reason to have that type of job security and any other team in the league would’ve moved on by now.
I have hope Michael cares more about the Bulls than his father, but this is astounding incompetence from the jump. However even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. Hopefully basketball Jesus will have some mercy on us.
blame giddey
Years ago i sent an email to the bulls venting and was so surprised to get a response from Mike (or his handler). Either way, i appreciate the fact he seemed to care. Now we will see.. I’m giving him 3 years to see if he can fix this mess
I've seen several anecdotes portraying Mike as a Michael Scott esque well-meaning doofus
That’s fair, because only a Michael Scott esque owner would think it makes sense to talk about how tanking it bad while ALSO talking about how the Bulls could have drafted Cooper Flagg if they only lost one more game while ALSO not recognizing that point isn’t even really accurate.
it's such an annoying spin. There's no guarantee that would have been our pick.
He does have that same look lmao
I neglected to mention that I don't believe Reinsdorf said 'NBA Title' once. They're clearly not a championship level organization so why lie I guess? I'm just hoping they are a 'make the conference finals' and not 'get the 6th seed' kind of benchmark
I think we all know which one it’s gonna be.
One hot take I'm thinking about is that the various guys who have been around forever and get paid to do nothing (headed by Paxson) probably don't want Donovan to get control because there's a good chance he'll just stop or dramatically reduce their checks and divert that money to guys that actually do something.
That would explain why Michael comes out and, in the same press conference, says he and Paxson and former Iowa State bagman Brian Hagen will be running the search along with hired consultants (lol). And then, in the next breath says that he hasn't actually talked to Billy Donovan, but would certainly strongly consider turning the whole organization over to him.
That suggests to me that in addition to Michael being a hopeless fop, there are two ways this could go, and the dreary old entitlement crew is pushing for one direction and Michael seems to have the (correct) instinct that he needs to cut the cord, but also has the (incorrect) instinct to do whatever the last person he talked to suggested he do.
maybe, that puts some ambition - even the backstabbing kind - on Paxson that I'm not sure he has. I suppose if his gravy train is threatened, but I think Donovan is more in 'old dreary' (and catholic school point guard) cohort than against it
I do think it was awful and strange that Paxson is even mentioned. Why, especially if you are saying you're bringing in a search firm too? I think Michael still believes fans idolize Pax like he and his dad do, when in reality he showed his ass to be extremely out of touch with the modern NBA and they supposedly want to get someone who gets that
Man, I'm glad you found some positives because I sure didn't!
1. Using a search firm this time - It may be good, it may be bad; I don't think it's unequivocally good
2. No in-person restrictions from Covid like in 2020 - same as #1. As an international teacher who has interviewed and been hired both online and in person, it's a good and bad thing. I guess it CAN put one person over the top of others, but whoever you actually bring in for in-person interviews should already have been checked out. I don't see how brining AKME in would have revealed his biggest weaknesses - making moves and communicating with the public (not the same as communicating face-to-face)
I read it as an excuse the first time through.
3. Acknowledged an important quality is communication, both internally and externally to the fanbase, and he admitted that Arturas Karnisovas was awful at that - it's important, but it's 10x more important to actually make the right moves. AK could have led the Bulls to championship, and I never would have cared what he said. Conversely, he could have been a great communicator but had all the same moves, and it might have just kept him around longer.
In politics, they talk about whether soemthing is a policy problem or a messaging problem. AKME was clearly both, but if you have mediocre or bad policy, it doesn't actually make things good.
4. Acknowledged that he needs to be less hands-off when something seems blatantly wrong - not sure this is a good thing.
But since this is a Reinsdorf, and these are The Bulls, there were some troubling indications that they’d repeat past mistakes.
1 . John Paxson is still hanging around and Reinsdorf cited him as an influence (gag), and also still around is Gar Forman’s former bag man Brian Hagen. Holdovers from the AKME regime include the lesser Connelly brother and JJ Polk - yes, bad
2. The deference to the incumbent head coach, Billy Donovan - by far the most damning, and goes back to #4 in the previous. He's already putting his thumb on the scale even before the hire a new executive. I want an owner who is less involved, not more.
And I'm still not convinced Billy Donovan is a good to very good NBA coach. He has a career .500 record, and, except for the 1 year he won with the Bulls, he's had a Hall of Famer on every winning team. He was an amazing college coach - but that's a whole "different game". Almost no college coach has gone from successful college coach to successful NBA coach, and I'm not sure Donovan is going to end up as one of the exceptions.
I'll add, if it wasn't obvious, that I think the only way this team gets good is if it gets lucky in hiring the right executive. What li'l 'Dorf said made me think he has absolutely no clue about what makes good basketball and not even what it would take to make a good executive. No talk of the salary cap or winning on the margins, or finding gems, or... just anything other than "talk good" and "don't change coach".
The perfect executive for this team has to be able to:
1. Convince ownership he's not spending too much money
2. Have a great analytics-focused philosophy (whether himself or just wanting to hire the people who do) to achieve #1
3. Know the cap or make sure to hire someone that can do that
4. #2 and #3 yet still be a "good ol' boy" that will convince Michael and Paxson et al. that he's not just a nerd
5. be a tremendous leader who can transform an old, "traditional" front office to a modern, progressive one
6. but not be bothered by having to keep the same coach and having old Paxson and Bagen still in the building (so, somehow transformational but not)
7. All the other things that make a basketball executive great
When I think of constraints by the ownership, I think of #4 and #6. I guarantee that's not what AKME think - in fact, that's probably a couple of areas in which they excelled.
I think this team won't be good because I'm not sure who that person is. It could be a new, younger person who would be willing to put up with some shit to get their first gig, but a) would they still be able to convince Bulls FO that they're good, and b) would they stick around for awhile once they found some success?
Otherwise, I think most of the things I think make a good executive will go by the by in favor of someone who just "clicks" with the owner and Paxson et al.
I think that the most important quality for a Bulls GM is to be insanely competitive.
This is an organization that fundamentally doesn't care about winning basketball games. No GM has ever been fired for failing to make the playoffs or advancing past the first round. It's always about being an embarrassment for the owners, or selling less tickets or something like that.
It's very difficult to do something very well when your boss doesn't care if you do it at all. You need to have a borderline pathological internal motivation for that.
or be a good salesman and convince them that relevance and deep playoff runs will get you MORE money
I agree that the search firm and Covid restrictions are not inherently good, it was more that it was different than whatever led them to the AK hire. I didn't intend to put these points in any order of importance
Reinsdorf did go into other qualities besides 'talk good', yes there was the banal 'process oriented' but also he found AK to lack conviction, and that he was also looking for someone who is forward thinking and able to adapt - bringing up how Golden State prepared in advance for the media rights and salary cap explosion. now, 'tanking' is another type of big-brain move that he dismissed, but I think he more believes the hire should be able to figure out the anti-tanking measures. Also, I believe the communication hinderance with AK was not just assuaging the fans, but his discussions with ownership, the rest of the front office, and perhaps most importantly his dealings with other teams. That can hinder 'ability to make good moves'
And I just didn't take the Donovan praise to be that literal that he has to be kept. It was more that he unequivocally thought Donovan was a good coach (you disagree) and any worthwhile hire would agree. I still believe that the right guy could come in and convince both Billy and Michael that Billy shouldn't be coach if it's not the right fit. Now perhaps instead they get duped again by someone promising a quicker fix (and needing a win-now coach), Mike is 0-1 at this so far and I am not assuming he'll improve, just open to the possibility
All of that is "fair," of course. I will say I don't NOT think Donovan is a good coach; I'm just not yet convinced that he is after 9 years of data. For me, that's enough to move on. Even amidst a rebuild and all that, I'm not sure what his overriding philosophy is. Play young guys and development? Play older guys? Play guys with experience who won't mess up - i.e. avoiding negatives?
Anyway, yeah. Who knows? Wanting someone better than AKME is good - and even distinguishing what some of those things are is even better, but as we all agree, that's still a pretty low bar to clear.
As we are at a bit of a milestone, time for the grim exercise of recalling the best and most memorable Bulls moments from the last decade. I have the DeMar scream game, that weird as ceremony where Zach gave a girl a puppy, maybe there was a good Lonzo game in there from the LLVD high water mark? Maybe that 14 and 8 Patrick Williams near double-double? That's all I've got.
maybe a few Caruso defensive highlights ?
and then thinking good old Taj is still around, reminding us some good times almost a few décades ago...
the 2-3 DeMar game winners
Yeah the back to back game winners in different years was fun. Definitely one of the best highlights.
I wonder if Donny was one foot out to UNC and junior asked what he could do to keep him and the answer was AKME heads on a platter? Maybe not a guarantee of Donny wanting to stay but rather him taking advantage of the situation. Either he coaches at UNC or he gets rid of his idiot bosses…
I 100% believe this conversation happened. How much Reinsdorf put stock into it, and how much it played into the firing, only he knows. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of his talking points came directly from Donovan. Donovan probably taught him more about basketball and what they need as an executive in a 30-minute conversation than Michael learned the entire rest of his life.
A few final thoughts as the season ends today:
1) It’s important to not forget that Michael a) Doesn’t actually understand the sport and b) Doesn’t have any strong beliefs about team building other than disliking tanking. So anything he says about the current state of the team doesn’t really matter. I know KC reported that the Bulls think they can turn this thing around quickly, but that’s just simply because Michael is an overly optimistic doofus. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to force a GM to build a win now team around Giddey or something like that. Michael has no idea what he actually wants.
2) Teams with bad owners can win as long as they make good hires. It happens in every sport. Hopefully it finally happens with the Bulls.
3) My prediction as of now is that Billy will leave and the Bulls will hire Matt Lloyd. I also think this team will look vastly different sooner than later and there’s a strong chance Matas will be the only current Bull still on the roster 1-2 seasons from now.
Doc Rivers is officially free to terrorize another team. I know it's unlikely and it's the paranoia talking, but his Chicago roots and a Bulls FO that's the right amount of dumb has me a bit nervous.
ol' billy starting to not look so bad
If anyone wants to make the case that triple-doubles are overrated as a stat, tonight's game was Exhibit A.
Olbrich gets the stupidest triple double exactly two years to the day after Sanogo had that 20 point 20 rebound game against the Wizards.
And just like when Bulls fans were screaming for Sanogo to get more playing time because of that one end-of-season game in which the Wizards weren't trying, I'm sure fans will be begging for Olbrich to get more minutes next season because maybe he's the next Jokic!
So happy we don't have to hear an AK press conference trying to list positives from this season, Giddey's arbitrary in-game stat benchmarks would be up there
What are the odds we get dumb ass Doc Rivers to join our dumb ass owners?
I'm slightly worried about this too. But I think you'd have to be Mavs ownership levels of ignorant to actually consider it.
Higher than the odds we move into the top 4 in the draft.