The Bulls are in the worst place to be in the NBA: the middle.
The issues with the franchise go well beyond the embarrassing feud that highlighted the train-wreck pairing of Rajon Rondo with Dwyane Wade and Jimmy Butler. While that proved the incompatibility of the roster and the inability of their coach, Fred Hoiberg, to bring together an NBA locker room, the focus should not stray from their deepest issue: the men who all thought this was a good idea.
This perfectly mediocre 28-29 season has been a predictable product of the toxic culture created by executives Gar Forman and John Paxson. One that started with the ugly handling of the firing of Tom Thibodeau, a coach who kept the Bulls a consistent threat to LeBron James in Cleveland and Miami.
As a reward, Thibodeau was canned with a bitter and tone-deaf press release that showed Bulls’ brass valued working with people they liked over winning. Hoiberg, Forman and Paxson’s hand-picked replacement, has done nothing to prove he knows how to coach an NBA team. His first year included public criticism from Butler. The second season has shown a lack of communication through the benchings of Rondo and Michael Carter-Williams and the handling of the alpha-dog mess.
And now as the trade deadline approaches, the Bulls are stuck with a handful of undesirable options.
They could attempt to trade Butler, easily their best player and most valuable trade chip, as they nearly did in the offseason. But what kind of value would the Bulls get? The Kings just unleashed a blueprint with DeMarcus Cousins of what happens when overmatched decision-makers are tasked with trading a star player. The Celtics thus far appear unwilling to trade either of the Nets’ first-round picks they have in the next two seasons, and getting 30 cents on the dollar would throw the Bulls into a full rebuild and give Forman and Paxson more leeway and time to show they are the answers to turning the franchise around.
They could fire Hoiberg after the season and bring in a more traditional, veteran coach who plays to the roster’s strengths. For all of Hoiberg’s communication deficiencies, he was set up to fail. He was thrown into the ring without a single player who fits the fast paced, run-and-gun style of offense he wants to run. Their .318 team 3-point percentage is certainly a sum of its parts: Nikola Mirotic, their highest volume 3-point shooter, is shooting a measly .301 from deep. The former Iowa State coach might have made sense in a complete rebuild – which Bulls’ brass reportedly considered this summer – but not with this group of poor-shooting veterans with bigger personalities than his.
They’ve missed on draft picks for years (Marquis Teague, Tony Snell, Doug McDermott) and aren’t bad enough to land a top pick. And they don’t seem to have a clear plan on how to fix this mess – a mess they’ve made almost completely on their own. Leaving them without assets to try to find a way to build around Butler with a different group of high-end players even after Rondo is out after the season.
Owner Jerry Reinsdorf is famously loyal and infamously immune to public pressure, so Forman and Paxson are unlikely to go anywhere. But the status quo clearly isn’t working, and there aren’t a whole lot of options for a quick fix.
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