You can always count on AK to learn the wrong lessons from any given scenario, and this month is providing him with a buffet of poor takeaways.
A Pacers vs. Knicks ECF should tell him that the East is wide open, so it’s time to stop aiming for mediocrity and actually build a contending team.
Instead, he’s going to ignore that Haliburton and Brunson are great, and say “Indy and New York don’t have stars and weren’t top seeds, yet they made the conference finals! That could be us!”
The Mavericks winning the lottery should be a gut punch for him since he could have had better odds than them if he would have accepted his fate at the trade deadline and pivoted towards focusing on the offseason.
Instead, he’ll say “See? A play-in team won the lottery! There’s no reason to not be happy about the play-in!”
Who needs elite rosters or top picks? We’ve got a 39-43 three-peat to win!
I've been saying this since the halcyon days of Blogabull back in 2009-2010. "This is entertainment. I wouldn't eat shit-flavored candy so why would I watch shit basketball?"
Considering that Xfinity didn’t carry CHSN for entire seasons of the Bulls and Hawks and a quarter of the White Sox season so far, I’m guessing that there is little demand for CHSN.
Bulls do own all of their picks though, and that's something. At least theoretically you could put together a really nice trade package for a genuine star player.
If they aren't going to do that then they should tank.
The problem with Max Strus was that he can make jump shots. That is not what the Bulls are looking for from their role players. I don't know what the hell they're looking for but shooting isn't it. If Strus was 6'7" and shot 23% from 3 he'd have been a Bull for life.
I have a half-cocked idea that the Bucks should desperately reason with Giannis that they may never win a title but they can be interesting and in the dogcrap East where anything is possible it actually may be a better play for his career legacy to stay.
trade Lillard back to Portland, where he can rehab and likely retire.
Portland sends back Jerami Grant, who has 1 yr longer contract at $36.5M that they already screwed up with and may instead have to use a pick to get out of if they keep waiting. They can also send another big salary or two - negotiate if it's a useful player or Deandre Ayton, and they reduce next year's payroll. They would take a hit in 2026-27 with paying Lillard $58.5M (so $20M more than Grant) but Lillard is box office for them so it may not be the worst thing monetarily. And they wouldn't be losing any assets or reversing a tank or anything so it doesn't hurt their team building.
Bucks are still pretty limited but not totally. They can re-sign Lopez but not HAVE to, and have $22M of expiring contracts in Portis and Connaughton as trade flotsam.
I really think there's a case to be made that you have a higher likelihood winning a title on an average team in the East versus a very good team in the West
The picks are less valuable in trades than some because they're likely late lottery (confirming this year obviously). But I do think another team would be making a smart bet figuring the Bulls will remain bad for a while no matter who you trade them.
This is obviously less important, but they don't technically have all of their picks. They don't have their own second round picks for the next three years (this year included). They do have Sacramento's second round pick this year though.
Celtics gotta reduce payroll, a Jrue Holiday salary dump would be pretty awesome. I'm dreaming of course, more than AK is dreaming, but what an upgrade over Lonzo for vet PG/Guard Defense.
More generally, there is going to be so much shuffling this season, Bulls will not be involved in any of it. We'll run the mediocre 12 back out again and not even try to take advantage of all the untenable situations existing in the league.
I don't know how many 20XX plans it takes for some people (KC Johnson most notably) to realize that expiring contracts are useless if you don't want to have longer term contracts. I have a burgeoning theory that Vuc is going to get bought out, one final star-friendly move for the non-star Vuc
While I like where your head is at, AK has proven over and over that he is 100% against taking on bad money in return for draft picks. If the Bulls add any players this summer, expect them to be in the "young, but experienced (and probably not very good)" mold.
Why take on legitimately good players like Jrue Holiday or Marcus Smart, along with additional assets, when you can instead re-sign genuinely bad players already on your team like Vooch at Pat Williams?
these lottery results on top of the season-long Lillard and Tatum injuries...the league has to step in and ban conferences
I get the motivations for the second apron (suppress 2-4 teams payroll) but it's really goofy that there aren't injury considerations. Milwaukee and Boston will own very large disabled player exceptions that they can't use. Seems like an oversight by players association to not at least get this as a small carveout. I don't think that can be renegotiated, but banning conferences is not part of the CBA.
yep, and the only rationale for Reinsdorf not being a driver of these rules is if he's too checked out to even notice
there is a crop of new owners with deeper pockets, and it was embarrassing the rest of the owners by spending 3x on payroll , even if it wasn't winning titles (like the Clippers and Suns)
I wonder which teams really pushed for the harsh second apron penalties. I’m guessing that most of them were the small market teams like New Orleans and Charlotte. I bet there was a surprise big market team (not the Bulls!) who wanted them as to not look cheap compared to the other big market teams. Maybe the Knicks?
Really enjoy reading these comments. I can't believe apron is the metaphor here but like Douglas Hofstadter says it's all an analogy. The Bulls are a strange loop.
I was saying it was also troublesome for the teams trying to take that "next step" last year. The Knicks couldn't offer to keep Hartenstein because of the 2nd Apron looming, and they ended up having to trade Divencenzo and Randle for Towns to get a center. They've done well to pivot, and I'm not sure how much better that team would have been (Brunson, Anunoby, Bridges, Hart, Randle, Hartenstein, Divencenzo, McBride, Mitchell) over this year because Towns offers a lot of offense, but Randle, Hartenstein, Divencenzo for Towns is a huge downgrade in overall talent and it was strictly because of the 2nd apron.
Similarly with the Wolves. They had to trade away Towns for smaller contracts because of the loming 2nd apron. And it was done pre-emptively.
I'm glad both have, so far, overcome that, but it wasn't a case of teams being great and having to make tough choices on a declining team (like the Warriors with Durant and Thompson or Denver with Brown and KCP). Those teams (and many others) took the financial penalties in pursuit of greatness, and then had to make tough decisions. But this was up-and-coming teams that were sort of kept from keeping a team together and trying to get there even in the first place.
Victor Wembanyama (21), Stephon Castle (20), Sochan (22)*, 2025 #2 OVR Pick, plus guys are arguably as good as the ones listed above but not definitely (Vassell, Branham, Champagnie) (also, #14 pick but I get why you're not including those - and they might trade it away for a future pick like last year, anyway)
If they nail #2, yikes. I think Dylan Harper, Stephon Castle, Jeremy Sochan, Thomas Sorber (for fun), Victor Wembanyama... yikes.
Murray is better but a lot of his value is from being next to Jokic. Put Murray on the Bulls and he wouldn't raise the team at all. He is a way better ballhandler and that honestly is what makes him superior
Caruso with a casual +40 in game seven. It's so fun watching him do his thing in meaningful games. Oh, and he was guarding Jokic the majority of the time.
Another dagger in the guts. Everyone in the league knew he would do this in the playoffs. We just needed to make them bid for him. And value the right assets. They couldn't even get them to throw in one of their historically large number of first rounders. They can't even put all of these players on a roster and we still could not get a pick from them.
Never mind the fact that they couldn't get a first rounder out of OKC, they didn't even get a 2nd! OKC owns something like 12 second picks between now and 2029! Did the Bulls even ask for one? Do the Bulls understand that draft picks are assets? I can't believe that OKC would have submarined the deal if the Bulls insisted on them including a second round pick.
They would not have submarined the deal for two firsts! They were laughing into their sleeves the entire time. They could only leave them out because we did not ask.
You know when you list a car on Facebook marketplace and the car's worth is like $10k and then inevitably some guy asks if you'll sell it for $2k? I'm fairly certain that's what Presti did and then AK was like "Yeah, that seems reasonable."
Do we think there was a moment of silence after that because Presti genuinely couldn't believe what had just happened?
The fact that people still claim we "won" the trade simple bc P Giddy's counting stats in the reg season were technically better...LOL. Caruso is a player that any contending team wants and can use.....there is no reason that we should have only gotten one middling prospect
That middling prospect had just proven himself to be a horrible playoff player. He was a problem. OKC would have been better just by moving him on, let alone getting the greatest 3+D doesn't need the ball defensive captain bench player in nba history. The run Caruso is on right now is legendary, and they didn't just get him for free, they got him by dumping their worst player.
It's the greatest straw into gold move in NBA history.
It’s always interesting to go back and look at all rookie teams to see what happened to their careers. Here is 2002-3 all rookie second team: Carlos Boozer, J.R. Bremer, Manu Ginóbili, Gordan Giriček,Jay Williams. It’s such an odd collection of players. We all know what happened with Jay. Boozer was a solid player for a decade. Ginóbli had a hall of fame career with the Spurs. I don’t remember Bremer or Giriček at all. Bremer was undrafted and only played 100 games in three seasons in the league before going to play in Europe. Giriček was drafted in the second round of the 1999 draft so he was pretty old when he made his NBA debut and played in 384 games in six seasons.
I remember that game! I thought he was going to be ELITE. Then the Bulls picked him up at some point and I knew he was clearly a bust if the Bulls were taking a shot at him.
saw this from Drew Stevens, he didn't mean it this way but it's AK catnip:
"Between Matas Buzelis, Ayo Dosunmu, Josh Giddey, Patrick Williams, Coby White, Kevin Huerter and Lonzo Ball, the Bulls could have as many as seven former All-Rookie Second-Team players on their roster next season."
At this point, I fully expect the Pacers to go down 0-3 to the Thunder in the Finals and then win four straight games in which they trailed by at least 15 points with under three minutes remaining in the game.
You can always count on AK to learn the wrong lessons from any given scenario, and this month is providing him with a buffet of poor takeaways.
A Pacers vs. Knicks ECF should tell him that the East is wide open, so it’s time to stop aiming for mediocrity and actually build a contending team.
Instead, he’s going to ignore that Haliburton and Brunson are great, and say “Indy and New York don’t have stars and weren’t top seeds, yet they made the conference finals! That could be us!”
The Mavericks winning the lottery should be a gut punch for him since he could have had better odds than them if he would have accepted his fate at the trade deadline and pivoted towards focusing on the offseason.
Instead, he’ll say “See? A play-in team won the lottery! There’s no reason to not be happy about the play-in!”
Who needs elite rosters or top picks? We’ve got a 39-43 three-peat to win!
that's right. the man is outright dumb, and likely will try and say because 1.8% and last year 3% odds won the lottery, that's actually the sweet spot
On the bright side, I will be saving money by not buying League Pass this year. I'll just watch the good teams that get nationally televised games.
I've been saying this since the halcyon days of Blogabull back in 2009-2010. "This is entertainment. I wouldn't eat shit-flavored candy so why would I watch shit basketball?"
We need Blogabull Veteran t-shirts for all of the people from that era.
"I survived the Blog-a-'Bron thread wars"
Where do I send my monies?
There will be a ton of games on Peacock and Amazon this year.
I can't imagine there's a mob at the local Xfinity office for them to carry CHSN
Considering that Xfinity didn’t carry CHSN for entire seasons of the Bulls and Hawks and a quarter of the White Sox season so far, I’m guessing that there is little demand for CHSN.
I’m “lucky” that I can get it through my antenna. And you’re right, the programming is sparse and cheap looking.
They locked up multimedia dynamo David Haugh
Bulls do own all of their picks though, and that's something. At least theoretically you could put together a really nice trade package for a genuine star player.
If they aren't going to do that then they should tank.
God, that is depressing.
The problem with Max Strus was that he can make jump shots. That is not what the Bulls are looking for from their role players. I don't know what the hell they're looking for but shooting isn't it. If Strus was 6'7" and shot 23% from 3 he'd have been a Bull for life.
Gotta just get them in a room with Peter Patton....oh, wait...
With the 12th pick in the 2025 NBA draft, the Chicago Bulls select Egor Demin!
Miami has $50M in expirings. I see them as a clear Durant destination, but don't have the picks+prospects to get Giannis.
I have a half-cocked idea that the Bucks should desperately reason with Giannis that they may never win a title but they can be interesting and in the dogcrap East where anything is possible it actually may be a better play for his career legacy to stay.
trade Lillard back to Portland, where he can rehab and likely retire.
Portland sends back Jerami Grant, who has 1 yr longer contract at $36.5M that they already screwed up with and may instead have to use a pick to get out of if they keep waiting. They can also send another big salary or two - negotiate if it's a useful player or Deandre Ayton, and they reduce next year's payroll. They would take a hit in 2026-27 with paying Lillard $58.5M (so $20M more than Grant) but Lillard is box office for them so it may not be the worst thing monetarily. And they wouldn't be losing any assets or reversing a tank or anything so it doesn't hurt their team building.
Bucks are still pretty limited but not totally. They can re-sign Lopez but not HAVE to, and have $22M of expiring contracts in Portis and Connaughton as trade flotsam.
I really think there's a case to be made that you have a higher likelihood winning a title on an average team in the East versus a very good team in the West
The picks are less valuable in trades than some because they're likely late lottery (confirming this year obviously). But I do think another team would be making a smart bet figuring the Bulls will remain bad for a while no matter who you trade them.
This is obviously less important, but they don't technically have all of their picks. They don't have their own second round picks for the next three years (this year included). They do have Sacramento's second round pick this year though.
Celtics gotta reduce payroll, a Jrue Holiday salary dump would be pretty awesome. I'm dreaming of course, more than AK is dreaming, but what an upgrade over Lonzo for vet PG/Guard Defense.
More generally, there is going to be so much shuffling this season, Bulls will not be involved in any of it. We'll run the mediocre 12 back out again and not even try to take advantage of all the untenable situations existing in the league.
I don't know how many 20XX plans it takes for some people (KC Johnson most notably) to realize that expiring contracts are useless if you don't want to have longer term contracts. I have a burgeoning theory that Vuc is going to get bought out, one final star-friendly move for the non-star Vuc
Hmm maybe, but AK loves filling out a roster, and Vuc fills a roster spot.
While I like where your head is at, AK has proven over and over that he is 100% against taking on bad money in return for draft picks. If the Bulls add any players this summer, expect them to be in the "young, but experienced (and probably not very good)" mold.
He is very in favor of taking on bad money signing his own players
Why take on legitimately good players like Jrue Holiday or Marcus Smart, along with additional assets, when you can instead re-sign genuinely bad players already on your team like Vooch at Pat Williams?
or Harrison Barnes instead of Jalen Smith?
these lottery results on top of the season-long Lillard and Tatum injuries...the league has to step in and ban conferences
I get the motivations for the second apron (suppress 2-4 teams payroll) but it's really goofy that there aren't injury considerations. Milwaukee and Boston will own very large disabled player exceptions that they can't use. Seems like an oversight by players association to not at least get this as a small carveout. I don't think that can be renegotiated, but banning conferences is not part of the CBA.
yep, and the only rationale for Reinsdorf not being a driver of these rules is if he's too checked out to even notice
there is a crop of new owners with deeper pockets, and it was embarrassing the rest of the owners by spending 3x on payroll , even if it wasn't winning titles (like the Clippers and Suns)
I wonder which teams really pushed for the harsh second apron penalties. I’m guessing that most of them were the small market teams like New Orleans and Charlotte. I bet there was a surprise big market team (not the Bulls!) who wanted them as to not look cheap compared to the other big market teams. Maybe the Knicks?
Knicks seem to have an anti establishment mentality so maybe not
Lakers are a family business and probably were annoyed by Ballmer. Il
Really enjoy reading these comments. I can't believe apron is the metaphor here but like Douglas Hofstadter says it's all an analogy. The Bulls are a strange loop.
I was saying it was also troublesome for the teams trying to take that "next step" last year. The Knicks couldn't offer to keep Hartenstein because of the 2nd Apron looming, and they ended up having to trade Divencenzo and Randle for Towns to get a center. They've done well to pivot, and I'm not sure how much better that team would have been (Brunson, Anunoby, Bridges, Hart, Randle, Hartenstein, Divencenzo, McBride, Mitchell) over this year because Towns offers a lot of offense, but Randle, Hartenstein, Divencenzo for Towns is a huge downgrade in overall talent and it was strictly because of the 2nd apron.
Similarly with the Wolves. They had to trade away Towns for smaller contracts because of the loming 2nd apron. And it was done pre-emptively.
I'm glad both have, so far, overcome that, but it wasn't a case of teams being great and having to make tough choices on a declining team (like the Warriors with Durant and Thompson or Denver with Brown and KCP). Those teams (and many others) took the financial penalties in pursuit of greatness, and then had to make tough decisions. But this was up-and-coming teams that were sort of kept from keeping a team together and trying to get there even in the first place.
Where are the Spurs? Far and away #1
Victor Wembanyama (21), Stephon Castle (20), Sochan (22)*, 2025 #2 OVR Pick, plus guys are arguably as good as the ones listed above but not definitely (Vassell, Branham, Champagnie) (also, #14 pick but I get why you're not including those - and they might trade it away for a future pick like last year, anyway)
If they nail #2, yikes. I think Dylan Harper, Stephon Castle, Jeremy Sochan, Thomas Sorber (for fun), Victor Wembanyama... yikes.
*all as good or better as the ones above
They'd be #1, I Disqualified because they're clearly beyond rebuilding. They shrunk the timeline!
Similarly I'd put Sixers ahead of Bulls too if they were eligible in this goofy ranking
I'm a bit surprised nobody is quibbling with my rankings. I've built groupthink!
Off (and now dead) topic, but the idea of Zach LaVine being comperable to Jamal Murray is looking especially silly now
They basically swap roles going from the regular season to the postseason.
Murray is better but a lot of his value is from being next to Jokic. Put Murray on the Bulls and he wouldn't raise the team at all. He is a way better ballhandler and that honestly is what makes him superior
Caruso with a casual +40 in game seven. It's so fun watching him do his thing in meaningful games. Oh, and he was guarding Jokic the majority of the time.
Another dagger in the guts. Everyone in the league knew he would do this in the playoffs. We just needed to make them bid for him. And value the right assets. They couldn't even get them to throw in one of their historically large number of first rounders. They can't even put all of these players on a roster and we still could not get a pick from them.
FUCK!
Never mind the fact that they couldn't get a first rounder out of OKC, they didn't even get a 2nd! OKC owns something like 12 second picks between now and 2029! Did the Bulls even ask for one? Do the Bulls understand that draft picks are assets? I can't believe that OKC would have submarined the deal if the Bulls insisted on them including a second round pick.
They would not have submarined the deal for two firsts! They were laughing into their sleeves the entire time. They could only leave them out because we did not ask.
You know when you list a car on Facebook marketplace and the car's worth is like $10k and then inevitably some guy asks if you'll sell it for $2k? I'm fairly certain that's what Presti did and then AK was like "Yeah, that seems reasonable."
Do we think there was a moment of silence after that because Presti genuinely couldn't believe what had just happened?
The fact that people still claim we "won" the trade simple bc P Giddy's counting stats in the reg season were technically better...LOL. Caruso is a player that any contending team wants and can use.....there is no reason that we should have only gotten one middling prospect
That middling prospect had just proven himself to be a horrible playoff player. He was a problem. OKC would have been better just by moving him on, let alone getting the greatest 3+D doesn't need the ball defensive captain bench player in nba history. The run Caruso is on right now is legendary, and they didn't just get him for free, they got him by dumping their worst player.
It's the greatest straw into gold move in NBA history.
Matas made the all rookie second team which doesn’t mean a lot, but it’s not nothing.
Cody Williams, who was taken with the pick before Matas, didn’t get any votes. If there was a redraft, Matas probably goes third or fourth.
It’s always interesting to go back and look at all rookie teams to see what happened to their careers. Here is 2002-3 all rookie second team: Carlos Boozer, J.R. Bremer, Manu Ginóbili, Gordan Giriček,Jay Williams. It’s such an odd collection of players. We all know what happened with Jay. Boozer was a solid player for a decade. Ginóbli had a hall of fame career with the Spurs. I don’t remember Bremer or Giriček at all. Bremer was undrafted and only played 100 games in three seasons in the league before going to play in Europe. Giriček was drafted in the second round of the 1999 draft so he was pretty old when he made his NBA debut and played in 384 games in six seasons.
If I had the motivation and time, I would look at all rookie classes from 2000-2020 and see how often being all rookie predicted future success.
I remember that game! I thought he was going to be ELITE. Then the Bulls picked him up at some point and I knew he was clearly a bust if the Bulls were taking a shot at him.
Gordan Giricek was A PROBLEM
29 points in his debut!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKx8BRmKaXI&pp=ygUOZ29yZGFuIGdpcmljZWs%3D
saw this from Drew Stevens, he didn't mean it this way but it's AK catnip:
"Between Matas Buzelis, Ayo Dosunmu, Josh Giddey, Patrick Williams, Coby White, Kevin Huerter and Lonzo Ball, the Bulls could have as many as seven former All-Rookie Second-Team players on their roster next season."
I totally forgot that Patrick Williams made second team all rookie. It goes to show you that making an all rookie team doesn’t predict future success.
At this point, I fully expect the Pacers to go down 0-3 to the Thunder in the Finals and then win four straight games in which they trailed by at least 15 points with under three minutes remaining in the game.
Honestly, I think the fake version of Myles Turner is WCJ. Defense-first, supposedly can stretch the floor, and struggles to stay healthy.
Don't worry, Giddey will buck that trend by signing a five year deal instead of three.
We've got to go after Tony Bradley... again. Got to have those playoff caliber players.
Oh shit I saw jim boylen!!!
In real life?
You sure it just wasn't your thumb?
No, on the Indiana sideline.
Unless it was the bad clams I ate.
I was at the game Sunday and saw him in real life. It immediately took the smile off my face
The east is gonna be wide open next year, the Bulls will have continuity and everyone is in a contract year. Get ready!