This is the 2025 tank plan. The Bulls can lie to themselves about the utility of finishing 9th in a bad conference this year, but the bill will come due and they are going to be utterly terrible soon enough whether they trade their existing assets or not.
What bothers me it seems like there is a real lack of urgency with everything. What is the goal of this team? The amount of complacency around either: making a move or not seems to speak volumes about what the real goal are.
Exactly, you have someone working for the media partner saying all year 'well they can wait until the offseason' implying zero pressure when there should be a ton
The goal is to waste the prime years of everyone involved so you can re-sign them at a discount, and then waste more of the prime years of everyone involved so you can re-sign them at a discount again, before trading them in a salary dump for Andrew Bynum.
There isn't much urgency from management because there isn't from ownership.
The hot seat for GMs in this league seems so much less lately. I think owners are just happy enough that all these teams can make enormous amounts of cash without really trying.
In addition, AKME has enough ownership buy-in from a notoriously loyal owner. Ir seems like they could just ride out the current iteration of this team and rebuild - without a complete tear down and multiple years of being bottom basement.
Another triggering thing for me is the "well it's not only on the Bulls, you need other teams to make a trade". That's true, but not in the way they think.
EVERY OTHER team is making trades! So why can't the Bulls?
That argument about no deals being available makes sense for a while... but not when you made no moves last year at the deadline, and then no moves in the off season, and now nothing again... all while being a play-in team. As we all know, it goes way beyond last season with this franchise.
i mentioned this towards the beginning of the season, with “Don’t Embarrass Us Publicly” being the only behind-the-scenes ownership mandate for this front office that can be gleaned from their behavior.
at the time, i also said that zach asking for a trade and the bulls getting rare national headlines was a source of embarrassment and would lead to changes. funny how wrong that was! turns out you can just stand still enough and the ancient t-rex media that covers this team just moves on.
this off-season, i’d say i’m ““excited”” to see how they spin their modest playing-like-a-.500-team win streak (their one historic goal) with the fact that it came without their most expensive player (oops!). but there won’t be any joy in watching them fumble their way through explaining how it was possible, because they’ll face zero scrutiny. again.
What's so frustrating to me as a fan is that we don't know (and may never know) what trade offers the FO has turned down, and we don't know if AKME have been rebuffed in their dogged pursuit of trade partners, or just complacent/lazy. When we say the Bulls should have made a certain deal, we don't know that deal was ever feasible or on the table. So it's hard to discern exactly which of these I want to be angry about:
1. Are AKME truly content with making the play-in tourney and reticent to do anything that shakes things up, risks them looking like they got fleeced, and/or shifts the balance of this season in either direction (e.g., pay the tax to get better this year, trade assets for future picks to get worse). This approach makes me want to pull my hair out.
2. Are AKME working the phones like crazy and just getting garbage counter-offers back that we as fans would be aghast at them accepting? Being shrewd in this manner has superficial merits, but is an equally powerful indictment of AKME's competence in constructing a roster of poorly valued assets. The idea that our "stars" are undesirable by the league also makes me want to pull my hair out.
So I guess I just wanna know why I have so much hair on the floor.
I don't pay attention to college sports but it appears that the Vuc trade and their completely idiotic tampering with Lonzo is even more disastrous when you look at how many instant contributors came out of this draft. Art Karney had to buy in (further mortgaging future drafts) to get a guy who has contributed in like 2 games and is clearly benefiting from nobody expecting a fucking thing from him. Meanwhile, Lively is the starting center for the Mavericks (taken 1 pick after our pick that went to Orlando), and Jordan Hawkins, Keyonte George, Jaime Jaquez Jr, Brandin Podziemski, Cam Whitmore and Andre Jackson Jr (taken one pick after Phillips) are all rotation players taken between #14 and #36. These aren't guys eating minutes on bad teams, those teams playing them are better than Chicago.
In the last two drafts we could have added Walker Kessler (taken 4 picks after Dalen Terry) and Lively and had our PF/C slot sorted for the next 5 years, with nothing but journeyman and back-ups needed. You could have done this by just doing... nothing!
This is why I am disagreeing with popular opinion here. I don't want these guys to do anything. Inertia is a better GM than Karnisovas. If being "creative" means we lose a 2nd round pick in an incredibly deep draft because these jagoffs can't even time a press release correctly and announce a complicated trade involving two sign-and-trade players 30 seconds after midnight, I'd rather they just spend their day organizing Subway coupons.
Saw a headline that said Billy was not in favor of a trade because of injuries and would be concerned about team dynamic. Because the team is so fucking good right now? JFC.
though I guess I could believe it. It's one of AK's many contradictions that Billy Donovan is this fantastic coach, yet also the locker room couldn't survive a midseason trade
This article isn't saying Billy is opposed to a trade, just that he's not interested in "warm bodies" to fill roster spots regardless of whether they are guys who are committed to winning. Essentially just not wanting to move assets for more Tristan Thompsons. (Or perhaps...more Zachs?) I can fault Billy for a lot of things but I'm on board with him on this.
I don't want to do a trade for trade's sake either, but I just laughed at the idea that the chemistry of the team right now is so good but also potentially that fragile 😂
I'd be kinda interested in knowing the source of this article. The author appears to be in Croatia and is just aggregating without revealing any sources, a few quotes I googled from it don't seem to turn up any other hits and it's Sports Illustrated, they're both financially and morally disintegrating.
ya know...this is ok for a coach to think. It's astounding though that the GM is so weak that he also thinks the same way - and likely because he relies on Billy for personnel decisions too
It goes along with the lack of urgency mentioned in another comment. Everyone's just blaming the injuries with no desire to do anything. I mean I'm not a big fan of when the coaches just completely throw the players under the bus without taking some responsibility for mistakes they have made. But I feel like there is a tactful way to acknowledge that there is room for improvement for the roster beyond just praying for health.
It’s crazy. Every team has injuries. Memphis just finished 2nd in the West last year, and due to injuries/suspensions and underperformance, they’ve just decided to rebuild around Morant, Jackson, Jr, and Bane. Granted, those players are better than the young ones the Bulls have, but still, it’s a pivot.
It could also be the Billy is just saying this because AK told him to. We all know one of the reasons AK loves Billy so much is because he's fine being AKs mouthpiece.
Regardless of who actually thinks this, it's absolutely ridiculous and shows how unserious this organization is.
It's incredible how AKME has done terribly bad every task of their job.
- Made bad/useless trades, or directly not made any.
- Bad use of the draft picks, as other comment above noted the players they missed in recent drafts, while drafting players who don't fit or directly don't even have minutes.
- Too large contracts renewals in terms of money/years (Coby is an exception, don't make me speak about Vuc...).
- Didn't make any FA signing of relevance (Caruso exception), only some rotation players who didn't make such an impact, in fact, the big FA signing was Lonzo...
- The last task they could at least fulfill was the "don't be a meme" thing and, again, failure.
I disagree with this a bit as I think the team they constructed with a healthy Lonzo was good. My main problem with AKME is that once it was clear that Lonzo wasn't coming back, they did zero to pivot off of that plan. Amazingly, even though it was clear that their plan would not come to fruition, they recommitted to it by extending Vuc. It was like they had one idea and nothing beyond that.
The misuse of draft picks is a real problem. The Bulls don't have their first rounder next year and don't have any second rounders until 2028. Without picks, trades become harder and you need to really nail the picks you do have (which they have shown no ability to do, save for Ayo).
Not sure I agree about this team with Lonzo. Were they immediately better than most people were expecting? Absolutely, and fun too! But they definitely weren't as good as their record made them look. They had a very easy strength of schedule the first half of that season and they lost to pretty much all of the good teams too. I'd say with a healthy Lonzo, that team was a genuine 5 or 6 seed. Maybe you could argue a 4 seed, but they definitely weren't anywhere near being a true contender.
Plus, when you build a team that is "good" when they are fully healthy, but completely falls apart when their fourth best player goes down with an injury, you haven't constructed your team well. Anyone worth half their salt could construct a pretty decent team (when fully healthy) by spending a ton of money. That's what AKME did. They had one idea and went out and spent a boatload of money on it and it turned out pretty good. Any front office that knows what they're doing should be able to add layers to that and adjust as needed. AKME have been completely unable to do that.
For real. Go back and watch highlights from when Lonzo was playing. They were running out Alize Johnson, Alfonzo McKinney and Tyler Cook. None of those guys are even in the league anymore! That team was a mirage. An incredibly fun mirage, but a mirage nonetheless.
AKME blew a ton of money and picks on big name players and then brought in whoever they could to fill out the roster. There was no plan other than to bring in big name players and hope they would make this team good.
Trading Lauri Markkanen was not exactly unpopular (I was not opposed) but has turned out to be a total fucking disaster, only the fact that Karnisovas paid so much for Vucevic diminished the fact that he took one of the league's best stretch 4s and just dumped him rather than bother to negotiate an extension which turned out to be both affordable and totally justifiable considering Derrick Jones Jr was making $9 million the year we acquired him.
Actually that entire chain of transactions is some kind of study in the law of diminishing returns:
1. Start with Jimmy Butler (perennial all-star, has every tool, most important player on a 3 time ECF team)
2. Leads to Lauri Markkanen and Zach LaVine
3. Leads to Derrick Jones Jr and No Trade Market
4. Leads to... nothing.
Lauri makes $17 million this year btw, $3 million less than... ya know...
Would team of Lauri, Dunn, Zach, Coby, PW, Franz Wagner, Carter Jr, Gafford, Ayo, Dalen Terry, Jett Howard, and Phillips be better than our current roster? I think yes. Inertia for the win! Yet everyone shrugged when Lauri left and cheered when Vuc was acquired (JBCardsfan who is hated for liking a wining team from St Louis). Let’s be thankful Zach hasn’t been diminished to Harris, Wiseman, and K Hayes!
Feel like a normal team would direct these questions to medical staff or limit them to regular, written updates so you don't have this situation where a coach and ex-stockbroker is trying to sound optimistic about setbacks by first suggesting the setbacks are not setbacks at all before acknowledging that we have to be prepared for some of these setbacks.
yes it's very weird. I wondered if someone in the room is always asking Billy about this but I doubt he'd have that kind of answer - ambiguous as it is - off the top of his head
I don't see the benefit, outside of providing distraction I suppose
I mean considering I don't expect him to ever play in the NBA again, I'm just sort of like whatever at this point.
But I'm glad for him on a personal level that he seems to be able to do shit without pain now. That was really what I thought this surgery might do for him, and at least it did that.
He always had a long ass timeline out of this procedure so I never took any of these comments seriously.
>"There's a growing feeling among rival executives that the Bulls may have to attach another asset to move LaVine, something sources said the Bulls have been hesitant to do to this point. An alternative could be to merely move LaVine as a salary dump for expiring contracts, although NBC Sports Chicago has previously reported that the Bulls weren't at that stage yet. Plus, of course, it would take another team willing to do that."
I heard him on The Score (so yeah, my own fault) maintain that "I'm not saying this is right, just that it's their mindset" , but by not blasting that mindset as idiotic it's lending validity to it.
I don't believe a better front office couldn't gin up a market here. And additionally I don't see how it gets better in the offseason, he still has the same contract, a half season shorter but actually potentially increased to super-max after trade kicker
This is the 2025 tank plan. The Bulls can lie to themselves about the utility of finishing 9th in a bad conference this year, but the bill will come due and they are going to be utterly terrible soon enough whether they trade their existing assets or not.
LaVine salary dump and a waiver wire signing let's goooooooo get hype see red!!!
What bothers me it seems like there is a real lack of urgency with everything. What is the goal of this team? The amount of complacency around either: making a move or not seems to speak volumes about what the real goal are.
Exactly, you have someone working for the media partner saying all year 'well they can wait until the offseason' implying zero pressure when there should be a ton
The goal is to waste the prime years of everyone involved so you can re-sign them at a discount, and then waste more of the prime years of everyone involved so you can re-sign them at a discount again, before trading them in a salary dump for Andrew Bynum.
So you're saying they do have a trade in mind?
Except they didn’t even re-sign Vucevic at a discount!
There isn't much urgency from management because there isn't from ownership.
The hot seat for GMs in this league seems so much less lately. I think owners are just happy enough that all these teams can make enormous amounts of cash without really trying.
In addition, AKME has enough ownership buy-in from a notoriously loyal owner. Ir seems like they could just ride out the current iteration of this team and rebuild - without a complete tear down and multiple years of being bottom basement.
Another triggering thing for me is the "well it's not only on the Bulls, you need other teams to make a trade". That's true, but not in the way they think.
EVERY OTHER team is making trades! So why can't the Bulls?
That argument about no deals being available makes sense for a while... but not when you made no moves last year at the deadline, and then no moves in the off season, and now nothing again... all while being a play-in team. As we all know, it goes way beyond last season with this franchise.
And if no team wants any of your players, what does that say about the people who assembled those players?
AKShrug.gif
Since the team isn't going to be interesting any time soon, can we at least get more nights to boo widows?
i mentioned this towards the beginning of the season, with “Don’t Embarrass Us Publicly” being the only behind-the-scenes ownership mandate for this front office that can be gleaned from their behavior.
at the time, i also said that zach asking for a trade and the bulls getting rare national headlines was a source of embarrassment and would lead to changes. funny how wrong that was! turns out you can just stand still enough and the ancient t-rex media that covers this team just moves on.
this off-season, i’d say i’m ““excited”” to see how they spin their modest playing-like-a-.500-team win streak (their one historic goal) with the fact that it came without their most expensive player (oops!). but there won’t be any joy in watching them fumble their way through explaining how it was possible, because they’ll face zero scrutiny. again.
What's so frustrating to me as a fan is that we don't know (and may never know) what trade offers the FO has turned down, and we don't know if AKME have been rebuffed in their dogged pursuit of trade partners, or just complacent/lazy. When we say the Bulls should have made a certain deal, we don't know that deal was ever feasible or on the table. So it's hard to discern exactly which of these I want to be angry about:
1. Are AKME truly content with making the play-in tourney and reticent to do anything that shakes things up, risks them looking like they got fleeced, and/or shifts the balance of this season in either direction (e.g., pay the tax to get better this year, trade assets for future picks to get worse). This approach makes me want to pull my hair out.
2. Are AKME working the phones like crazy and just getting garbage counter-offers back that we as fans would be aghast at them accepting? Being shrewd in this manner has superficial merits, but is an equally powerful indictment of AKME's competence in constructing a roster of poorly valued assets. The idea that our "stars" are undesirable by the league also makes me want to pull my hair out.
So I guess I just wanna know why I have so much hair on the floor.
"we don't know if AKME have been rebuffed in their dogged pursuit of trade partners, or just complacent/lazy"
Oh we know!
I don't pay attention to college sports but it appears that the Vuc trade and their completely idiotic tampering with Lonzo is even more disastrous when you look at how many instant contributors came out of this draft. Art Karney had to buy in (further mortgaging future drafts) to get a guy who has contributed in like 2 games and is clearly benefiting from nobody expecting a fucking thing from him. Meanwhile, Lively is the starting center for the Mavericks (taken 1 pick after our pick that went to Orlando), and Jordan Hawkins, Keyonte George, Jaime Jaquez Jr, Brandin Podziemski, Cam Whitmore and Andre Jackson Jr (taken one pick after Phillips) are all rotation players taken between #14 and #36. These aren't guys eating minutes on bad teams, those teams playing them are better than Chicago.
In the last two drafts we could have added Walker Kessler (taken 4 picks after Dalen Terry) and Lively and had our PF/C slot sorted for the next 5 years, with nothing but journeyman and back-ups needed. You could have done this by just doing... nothing!
This is why I am disagreeing with popular opinion here. I don't want these guys to do anything. Inertia is a better GM than Karnisovas. If being "creative" means we lose a 2nd round pick in an incredibly deep draft because these jagoffs can't even time a press release correctly and announce a complicated trade involving two sign-and-trade players 30 seconds after midnight, I'd rather they just spend their day organizing Subway coupons.
Ya mean old ‘Wild Bill’ Inertia, who used to own the Vienna Beef on S Cicero? The post-game buffets would be better, but not sure about the roster…
If there is no move, then I am all aboard the fire AK train. There is zero reason to just ride this roster through another trade deadline. Zero.
yfbb, I appreciate you holding the Chicago sports media to the fire in this rant. It's not done enough and is spot on.
Saw a headline that said Billy was not in favor of a trade because of injuries and would be concerned about team dynamic. Because the team is so fucking good right now? JFC.
I'm gonna need a link to that lol
though I guess I could believe it. It's one of AK's many contradictions that Billy Donovan is this fantastic coach, yet also the locker room couldn't survive a midseason trade
Here it is lol: https://www.si.com/nba/bulls/news/billy-donovan-is-not-keen-on-making-a-deal-at-the-trade-deadline-just-to-fill-up-the-roster
This article isn't saying Billy is opposed to a trade, just that he's not interested in "warm bodies" to fill roster spots regardless of whether they are guys who are committed to winning. Essentially just not wanting to move assets for more Tristan Thompsons. (Or perhaps...more Zachs?) I can fault Billy for a lot of things but I'm on board with him on this.
I don't want to do a trade for trade's sake either, but I just laughed at the idea that the chemistry of the team right now is so good but also potentially that fragile 😂
Also, it's just churning ahead with the idea that we'd be so good without people getting injured. Even dalen Terry lol
Kendall Gill doctrine
I'd be kinda interested in knowing the source of this article. The author appears to be in Croatia and is just aggregating without revealing any sources, a few quotes I googled from it don't seem to turn up any other hits and it's Sports Illustrated, they're both financially and morally disintegrating.
Lol I'll be honest I didn't realize how bad SI had gotten. Google showed me the article as a recommendation. 😂
I had trouble finding this but it is in Cowley's story too. SI Serbian bot just didn't credit anyone
https://chicago.suntimes.com/bulls/2024/1/31/24057730/coby-white-scores-season-high-35-help-not-on-the-way
Lmao @ SI Serbian bot 😂
ha, thank you
ya know...this is ok for a coach to think. It's astounding though that the GM is so weak that he also thinks the same way - and likely because he relies on Billy for personnel decisions too
It goes along with the lack of urgency mentioned in another comment. Everyone's just blaming the injuries with no desire to do anything. I mean I'm not a big fan of when the coaches just completely throw the players under the bus without taking some responsibility for mistakes they have made. But I feel like there is a tactful way to acknowledge that there is room for improvement for the roster beyond just praying for health.
and it's even more egregious this season when they had their best stretch of play after someone got injured!
It’s crazy. Every team has injuries. Memphis just finished 2nd in the West last year, and due to injuries/suspensions and underperformance, they’ve just decided to rebuild around Morant, Jackson, Jr, and Bane. Granted, those players are better than the young ones the Bulls have, but still, it’s a pivot.
But even they realize they have to do something! Not just pretend like things will get better when people come back from injury.
It could also be the Billy is just saying this because AK told him to. We all know one of the reasons AK loves Billy so much is because he's fine being AKs mouthpiece.
Regardless of who actually thinks this, it's absolutely ridiculous and shows how unserious this organization is.
Right and I think that is sort of what I was getting at. That even Billy is saying the same shit.
It's incredible how AKME has done terribly bad every task of their job.
- Made bad/useless trades, or directly not made any.
- Bad use of the draft picks, as other comment above noted the players they missed in recent drafts, while drafting players who don't fit or directly don't even have minutes.
- Too large contracts renewals in terms of money/years (Coby is an exception, don't make me speak about Vuc...).
- Didn't make any FA signing of relevance (Caruso exception), only some rotation players who didn't make such an impact, in fact, the big FA signing was Lonzo...
- The last task they could at least fulfill was the "don't be a meme" thing and, again, failure.
I disagree with this a bit as I think the team they constructed with a healthy Lonzo was good. My main problem with AKME is that once it was clear that Lonzo wasn't coming back, they did zero to pivot off of that plan. Amazingly, even though it was clear that their plan would not come to fruition, they recommitted to it by extending Vuc. It was like they had one idea and nothing beyond that.
The misuse of draft picks is a real problem. The Bulls don't have their first rounder next year and don't have any second rounders until 2028. Without picks, trades become harder and you need to really nail the picks you do have (which they have shown no ability to do, save for Ayo).
Not sure I agree about this team with Lonzo. Were they immediately better than most people were expecting? Absolutely, and fun too! But they definitely weren't as good as their record made them look. They had a very easy strength of schedule the first half of that season and they lost to pretty much all of the good teams too. I'd say with a healthy Lonzo, that team was a genuine 5 or 6 seed. Maybe you could argue a 4 seed, but they definitely weren't anywhere near being a true contender.
Plus, when you build a team that is "good" when they are fully healthy, but completely falls apart when their fourth best player goes down with an injury, you haven't constructed your team well. Anyone worth half their salt could construct a pretty decent team (when fully healthy) by spending a ton of money. That's what AKME did. They had one idea and went out and spent a boatload of money on it and it turned out pretty good. Any front office that knows what they're doing should be able to add layers to that and adjust as needed. AKME have been completely unable to do that.
also they still only ever had like one pf on the roster. Some really weird choices to refuse to actually sign reasonable backups.
For real. Go back and watch highlights from when Lonzo was playing. They were running out Alize Johnson, Alfonzo McKinney and Tyler Cook. None of those guys are even in the league anymore! That team was a mirage. An incredibly fun mirage, but a mirage nonetheless.
AKME blew a ton of money and picks on big name players and then brought in whoever they could to fill out the roster. There was no plan other than to bring in big name players and hope they would make this team good.
lmao, I forgot any of those guys even existed.
Trading Lauri Markkanen was not exactly unpopular (I was not opposed) but has turned out to be a total fucking disaster, only the fact that Karnisovas paid so much for Vucevic diminished the fact that he took one of the league's best stretch 4s and just dumped him rather than bother to negotiate an extension which turned out to be both affordable and totally justifiable considering Derrick Jones Jr was making $9 million the year we acquired him.
Actually that entire chain of transactions is some kind of study in the law of diminishing returns:
1. Start with Jimmy Butler (perennial all-star, has every tool, most important player on a 3 time ECF team)
2. Leads to Lauri Markkanen and Zach LaVine
3. Leads to Derrick Jones Jr and No Trade Market
4. Leads to... nothing.
Lauri makes $17 million this year btw, $3 million less than... ya know...
Would team of Lauri, Dunn, Zach, Coby, PW, Franz Wagner, Carter Jr, Gafford, Ayo, Dalen Terry, Jett Howard, and Phillips be better than our current roster? I think yes. Inertia for the win! Yet everyone shrugged when Lauri left and cheered when Vuc was acquired (JBCardsfan who is hated for liking a wining team from St Louis). Let’s be thankful Zach hasn’t been diminished to Harris, Wiseman, and K Hayes!
Speaking of Lonzo, the big milestone of him to start "moving quickly" came and went and he's still not "moving quickly" per Donovan.
https://twitter.com/byjuliapoe/status/1753494446648254566
Feel like a normal team would direct these questions to medical staff or limit them to regular, written updates so you don't have this situation where a coach and ex-stockbroker is trying to sound optimistic about setbacks by first suggesting the setbacks are not setbacks at all before acknowledging that we have to be prepared for some of these setbacks.
yes it's very weird. I wondered if someone in the room is always asking Billy about this but I doubt he'd have that kind of answer - ambiguous as it is - off the top of his head
I don't see the benefit, outside of providing distraction I suppose
I mean considering I don't expect him to ever play in the NBA again, I'm just sort of like whatever at this point.
But I'm glad for him on a personal level that he seems to be able to do shit without pain now. That was really what I thought this surgery might do for him, and at least it did that.
He always had a long ass timeline out of this procedure so I never took any of these comments seriously.
example of KC providing cover for incompetence
>"There's a growing feeling among rival executives that the Bulls may have to attach another asset to move LaVine, something sources said the Bulls have been hesitant to do to this point. An alternative could be to merely move LaVine as a salary dump for expiring contracts, although NBC Sports Chicago has previously reported that the Bulls weren't at that stage yet. Plus, of course, it would take another team willing to do that."
I heard him on The Score (so yeah, my own fault) maintain that "I'm not saying this is right, just that it's their mindset" , but by not blasting that mindset as idiotic it's lending validity to it.
whose mindset is idiotic?
The Bulls for not being willing to trade an asset to unload Zach?
Or for being willing to just dump him?
Or other teams being unwilling to trade for him?
This wasn't clear... it was KC referring to the Bulls mindset of no urgency if they don't like the market now
I don't believe a better front office couldn't gin up a market here. And additionally I don't see how it gets better in the offseason, he still has the same contract, a half season shorter but actually potentially increased to super-max after trade kicker
Kings game thread is UP https://open.substack.com/chat/posts/5c713c11-1537-4a6c-aae8-44821f66cdb4