the Bulls have lost their tegridy

if AKME was capable of feeling shame, that'd be an embarrassing game we just saw

I think this here blog has a smart audience, and so I’m preaching to the choir and against somewhat-strawmen¹ when I get all up in arms about this so I won’t go to far into it yet again:

The Bulls are not stuck in the middle. Stop thinking they are inconsistent, or play up/down to competition² , or there’s some coaching move that would significantly help. They are the ‘down’ competition, they may be firmly out of the truly-awful group but in that next-worst tier. They are sub-middle! They’d love to be in the middle!

All that said, they should’ve beat an Atlanta Hawks team coming into their building having played the night before and thus resting many of their better players:

Instead that group of role players and minor-leaguers controlled all 48 minutes in Chicago, ultimately winning 110-94 and holding the Bulls to a putrid 91.3pts/100 possessions. Two of those 2-Way players were standouts, as Keaton Wallace had 27 and Daeqwon Plowden³ - in his first NBA game - had 19.

It had the potential to be much worse, as two of their better shooters in Bogdanovic and Mathews went a combined 1/15 from three and the Hawks as a team shot a measly 30% from distance. But the Bulls had their worst shooting night of the season only getting up 27 attempts and hitting 6 (22%).

But this wasn’t a game that simply saw a Bulls team missing shots and being sloppy with the ball yet again. They will probably always lose when those two things happen, but to lose to this Hawks outfit took a special deficiency in other areas, including a lack of effort.

And as someone whose only game-to-game motivation is daydreaming over how ashamed Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley feel watching it (in person! in front of the home fans!), this was the funniest game all season.

You had Josh Giddey getting his lazy dribble picked then a lazy foul to try and compensate:

And Giddey again with this defensive ‘stance’:

And Okongwu⁴ easily getting a loose ball and then sending Vuc stumbling into hell

And Dyson Daniels getting rewarded for awful free throw form (Hawks missed 7 free throws, another entry in ‘could’ve been much worse’ category) by having the ball come right back to him in between three Bulls, who proceeded to guide Daniels back to the rim.

And a Dalen Terry special: true two-way threat (to his own team)

There’s undoubtedly more, please post your favorites in the comments!

I am not upset at this lack of effort. I think there may be something to the theory - one that I just came up with - that the team on a back-to-back that plays all different players may have a freshness advantage over the team that plays the same guys both nights. And the Bulls role players are not actually better than the GLeague level of the Hawks on Wednesday, they just have better draft pedigree⁵.

But it’s notable that such a game can come from the team that has Billy Donovan out there every other game meandering for 8 minute chunks of speech at a time including words like ‘integrity’ and ‘competitiveness’.

And even THAT is not worth getting upset about, he’s a ballcoach, and that should be his mindset, which happens to be in unison with what his bosses in the front office said on media day.

What’s especially annoying is remembering that media day was the last time we heard from that front office. And even more annoying is the thought (that’s all we can do is speculate, since they go in hiding and never do anything) that they still feel like an overall success, and next time they speak will accentuate positives.

The Sixers lost again on Wednesday as well, and are still 2 games behind the Bulls for 10th place and a play-in tournament berth. Even if Philly does follow through on getting their own shit together and make a desperate run to overtake Chicago, it’s impossible to see a situation where by the trade deadline the Bulls - in AKME’s mind - aren’t still ‘in the hunt’ for postseason play. And thus they will make moves (or more accurately, not make moves) in that “competitiveness” and “integrity” motivation. That’s not so funny!

1. these are real people, but they’re either somewhat-naive fans, or those who work for the team broadcast

2. As a sub-middle team, they will win 2/3 of games against the dregs, and lose 2/3 games against the good teams, and it’s a toss-up against their own cohort. Read how the vaunted win over the Celtics was covered by their perspective: the Bulls are the bad team that makes better teams soul-search!

3. I hope he sticks around because CHGO’s post-game nickname of ‘Mr. Plow’ was a good one.

4. Selected 2 picks after Pat Williams, by the way. I’d mention what Williams did in this game but we are not caring about that anymore.

5. Also why Matas Buzelis looked comfortable, to the point where he was maybe the team’s 4th best player even at just 8 points on 8 shots.