New Bulls TV network sure to be as cheap and listless as basketball team it covers

if an irrelevant NBA team fails to broadcast their games, does it truly lose a viewer?

Bulls games, as they are contractually obligated this and every season, will be played and aired on television.

The Bulls don’t have a TV network partner though. NBC Sports Chicago is sunsetting, as Comcast is getting out of the regional sports network business leaving full ownership with the teams.

In its place for the Reinsdorf-owned Bulls and White Sox, and the Wirtz-family owned Blackhawks, is CHSN (the letters stand for…). Or at least it was signaled to be a couple months ago:

"Chicago Bulls" renewed for another (final?) season on television

However, mere weeks from launch (I see September 25th as the first Blackhawks preseason game, and the Bulls begin their first of 87 exhibition games this year on October 8th), the network is still just a mostly-blank website and mailbox in Nashville.

There’s been an attempt at getting some information on this lack of movement, Scott Powers, who does Blackhawks coverage for The Athletic¹ received a pretty-much ‘no comment’ (via). Jeff Agrest of the Sun-Times wasn’t able to get much more out of this new Reindscorp subsidiary, but did get news from another principal:

Will Perdue will not return to Bulls studio shows when the team moves its broadcasts to the Chicago Sports Network, which is set to launch Oct. 1., Perdue told [us]

Perdue was bad television. Even when he had good thoughts, and to give him credit he was critical of the team on occasion, he took way too long to deliver them.

But while not that valuable of an addition to the broadcast, he was at least another person. Perdue said that the new show will go down to a single analyst with a host, with some guest hosts peppered in there.

Per Agrest, the host is still in question (as Jason Goff is rumored to go back to WSCR Radio full-time) but the Analyst “is expected to be Kendall Gill”².

And as for other members of the NBC Sports Chicago team: the actual game broadcasters, Adam Amin and Stacey King are employed by the team and aren’t changing. However, “Bulls insider K.C. Johnson’s role is being determined”. KC was writing for their website, a sideline host during broadcasts, and co-hosted a regular podcast.

The team they’re broadcasting is sure to be terrible AND boring. I don’t think much can be done to generate interest from the broadcast side. And we know ‘dorf teams don’t even particularly appreciate ‘interest’, as it means actual scrutiny. So they will very likely go with another ‘dorf mentality: cut costs.

1. Will the Bulls garner full-time coverage from them this year? They stopped sending Darnell Mayberry on the road last season, and this is truly the least interesting team in basketball at the moment. OK maybe the Brooklyn Nets?

2. Gill is better television but has worse opinions. He said as recently as last season that the AKME Bulls deserved a chance to show what they were when fully healthy, because the Dynasty Bulls didn’t win their first few years either…