Some therapy for the tank-brained Bulls fans

tanking is a mission statement, a plan going into a season. AKME doesn't do those

I knew when the Bulls were gifted - through luck and their own ineptitude - a schedule break during the NBA Cup that things would get concerning for the tank-brained Bulls fan and observer.

And it turned out to be a prescient concern: the Bulls beat both the LaMelo-less Hornets and Barnes-less Raptors squads to put them tenth in the TankAThon reverse standings. And many are losing their minds.

Of course, those like yours truly who are above this emotional rollercoaster know that the Bulls were never tanking. Because “tanking” is not game-to-game strategy that we should obsess over at multiple points of a season. Tanking, defined as intentionally making decisions to ensure you lose more games in a season, is something that doesn’t happen mid-year¹ has to be decided at the top from the outset and implemented throughout the organization.

The top of the Bulls, Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley, did not do this. Then, in case they needed to reaffirm they are not smart enough to covertly do anything, they said as much that this lack of plan was the plan.

Incompetence and failure to communicate is how this front office works. So why already would not only mouthbreathers on X and Reddit be freaking out, but otherwise sensible people like Will Gottlieb of Chuggo write something like this? Will has been consistently and with acceleration talked about “tanking”, and worse posits it as some brilliant strategy. It’s getting more desperate and less realistic by the game.

After this latest win, Will acknowledged the soft schedule but still cites stats in these games as suggesting that the Bulls are “just good now”, and this is “problematic” because “getting a good player in this draft is the most important thing for the Bulls this year”.

This series of columns and post-game show comments by Gottlieb are poorly-made arguments. For one thing, he’s judging tanking success or failure as a result instead of judging the process. And if one truly believed tanking was so important as to be the only way forward, that means calling for AKME’s jobs. It’s an indictment that this is the preferred strategy to get out of a hole they themselves dug, but could also reason they should be fired by not starting way earlier and doing more difficult things.

Instead, Gottlieb lays out too-late criticism and prescribes half-measures. And the worst argument contained within is when Gottlieb says “luck is not a strategy”, yet many of his assessments of the Bulls and their ‘competitors’ tanking has been due to luck.

It’s lucky (good or bad, depending) that Vucevic and LaVine are playing this well. You probably aren’t making much difference getting them off the roster now versus keeping them while they regress to their usual level. It’s lucky that other teams have had injuries, oftentimes when facing the Bulls. Gottlieb mentions “perhaps LaVine’s back soreness is the start…they need to start digging much more aggressively” as if the injury is by (albeit too-late) design. That’s the biggest displayed symptom of tank-brain disease.

What is more likely to happen is that by simply playing not-awful teams again, the Bulls will be less effective and lose games. They’re going to wind up in a lottery range where they’ll have a good chance at a top-4 selection but non-zero chance they lose the pick entirely². and have a But they aren’t going to reach the true dregs and get the highest possible lottery odds, and were never going to.

Thinking they could still do so now is Underpants Gnome stuff. If one put more serious thought into this argument³, that losing enough games to win a top-4 lottery selection was the most important thing the Bulls could do and here’s how to do it, you wouldn’t go into the season also saying LaVine had to play this season to raise his trade value. Or it’s great news that Lonzo Ball is unexpectedly a positive contributor. Or that it’s good that Vuc is providing spacing and safety valves for the young guards.

Instead it’d mean putting forth more drastic measures way earlier than sitting out a single mid-December game. It’d be clamoring for a shutdown of LaVine once he had a healthy preseason. And instead of holding out for positive value on the bloated contracts of LaVine and Vucevic, trading projected-to-be-positive-contributors like Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu. Maybe some columns insisting Billy Donovan talked about and allocated playing time with player development (a.k.a. not actually caring about development⁴, but simply playing them because they’re worse) in mind.

And when it became readily apparent that not only was AKME not doing this, but they were telling everyone they weren’t doing it…I just don’t see the point in trying to still believe that they could, let alone would.

Perhaps my relative serenity - as much as writing a bunch about someone else’s writing is just good clean mental livin’ - is because I am instead insisting on something even less plausible: AKME’s immediate removal and replacement.

Gottlieb’s plan is ridiculous and too late to be as effective, but even if it was an subjectively better opinion it’s it’s a non-starter because it suggests a plan based on forward thinking. AKME doesn’t do that.

I suppose putting so much effort into hoping otherwise is not merely tank-brain, but simple exasperation in the face of Bulls inertia. And that’s something that afflicts us all.

1. outside of extraordinary circumstances, like with the Pelicans this season

2. losing the #11 pick to the Spurs is not that disastrous, and to credit Gottlieb he is consistent on this. To him, not selecting in the top-5 is the disaster, and if they lose the pick this year that means they can’t lose it next year when it’s top-8 protected and he also wants them to tank in that year too. I guess he must own a device where he gets to sim the seasons?

3. an argument I find to be unserious, but others disagree

4. that’s why it’s more valid to criticize them for failing at what they said they were trying to do versus wishing they did something entirely counter to their words and actions