The Play-In cannot salvage this putrid Bulls season

it's over, and it sucked

There’s an unmistakable indicator of following a directionless team: when you’re less concerned about the results versus how those results will be spun.

The Bulls have limped, literally in a lot of cases, to the finish of the 2023-24 regular season this week. They went over their preseason odds to hit 39 victories, and that looks to be their only achievement in what was a mostly desultory campaign.

Before the regular season finale, a game with zero stakes for the Bulls where Billy Donovan bizarrely played starters huge minutes (even Alex Caruso, a case where all season Donovan was insisting it was difficult to put on the floor for long stretches), he was talking like this was the third act of Hoosiers:

I would say at that point after that Boston game [dropping them to 5-19 on the season], I didn’t even know if we’d have a chance to play after today. So I think it’s a tribute to what those guys did. But we also paid the price of those 14, 15 games where we didn’t play good enough basketball which has put us in the situation where we have to earn our way into the playoffs. But I really appreciate what those guys have done because of what we’ve had to endure and what we’ve had to overcome. It’s not where we certainly want to be. But I will say this: It could’ve been a lot worse. And it speaks to the character of those guys in the locker room.

In the season’s final week, Donovan also cited the statistic that “$70M is sitting on the bench” in reference to all the injured members of the roster. KC Johnson of the Bulls broadcast partner warned everyone that the front office will likely say the same thing.

And indeed it seems like every Bulls fan is already dreading it, the only thing stopping one from crying is meme-ing.

I’m trying to get ahead of the anxiety by remembering that Arturas Karnisovas is a shameless liar and not even smart enough to be good at it. So the team’s results in the play-in literally do not matter. If they win and get demolished in the first round as the second-division’s lowest seed, it’ll be a triumph that they even made the playoffs. If they lose to the Hawks on Wednesday, they at least were a “tough out” and did well filling the building.

Remember, the Bulls did not get out of this tournament last season, but you would almost think they did given how often Karnisovas referenced barely losing (including owning a late lead!) to the Miami Heat, who did go on to the NBA Finals. This is not the reasoning of a lead decisionmaker who is supposed to have a broader view and rational assessment of his team. It is the flailing of a desperate moron to put so much importance on a single-elimination tournament.

No matter what happens in this ‘postseason’, and no matter how hard Karnisovas spins (Donovan gets a bit of a pass, he’s a coach and it’s coachspeak…though I don’t think this talk would fly in the SEC), this season was an abject failure.

Even the big excuse of injuries obviates any positives! They can’t pull off insisting the injuries were some hardship to ‘overcome’ when the only reason Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu ascended, and DeRozan was able to control so much of the clutch possessions, was because Ball and LaVine weren’t playing. Losing Patrick Williams for the final stretch likely did torpedo the team defense, but it also draws attention to the lackluster depth at forward the team went into this season.

Remember training camp? Where there wasn’t any fancy new additions like ‘better basketball players’ to get us hopeful, so we had to hear how they’d instead improve due to a better shot profile and faster pace.

That didn’t happen, at all. New rotation members (“value signings”) Torrey Craig and Jevon Carter flopped. Beyond Coby and Ayo, no young players took over roles, to where Javonte Green is likely playing 25 minutes in the postseason now.

Any success this season is due to factors they can’t plausibly take credit for: clutch performance, and crappy competition. If not for their ridiculously elevated play close-and-late, the Bulls would be more like a 28 win team. If the Eastern conference wasn’t a 25-year subsidized second division, they’d have an even longer shot at actually making the playoffs. There were a couple victories over Western Conference over-.500 teams, and those will undoubtedly be referenced, and we already undoubtedly also know that’s desperate spin any team can cling to.

Altogether, this current team stinks, and when looking at age, salary, and draft capital they are on the wrong side of hope.

But like for some of these regular season games, they can plausibly win two more. But it’s implausible that it changes anything about how we should feel about them going forward.