I seriously doubt they’d trade Naz for Lonzo straight up.
from a value standpoint, no, but they aren’t going to be able to keep Reid without paying a bazillion in tax, and that feels like a steep price for your third big
As little as possible.
Link to the report?
This is from Hollinger’s deadline recap
Wow, the Bulls almost chose a direction. I mean, they were this close. Trading LaVine after two years of trying, and getting their first-round pick back in return, should have been the first rock in the rebuilding landslide.
Instead … crickets.
Nikola Vučević is 34, having his best season and … is still here. According to a league source, the Bulls had a firm offer to get a first-round pick and take on future money for Lonzo Ball and extended him instead. Good news, though: 12 of the Bulls’ players are signed for next season. They can just re-sign Josh Giddey, run it back and chase the Play-In again. Yay?
Then KC Johnson confirmed that Minnesota had offered this pick
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The only contract that really makes sense is McDaniels but that’s surprising
Yeah that makes very little sense to me and the Bulls should’ve been falling over themselves to take that. The thing that makes more sense is a 3-way swap where McDaniels goes out for some kind of Conley replacement and the Bulls take back some truly dead money on somebody else’s books?
Yeah I guess but McDaniels seems sort of core to their identity
But so did Towns
Wolves fan buddy thinks it was Randle and a pick for Lonzo. But if that was the case I just can’t imagine AK passing that up. It’s a free good player and a pick.
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Mayberry’s tongue is firmly on cheek here right
I’ve read enough to think he’s saying “hey look, they traded Zach, yeah, but they have four lottery picks of their own from the last six years on this roster so if these guys weren’t incompetent, they should be fine”
This isn’t how anyone envisioned the Bulls kick-starting their rebuild. Losses were to be expected, but a 40-point pasting on their home floor has nothing to do with life after Zach LaVine. The Bulls still have four first-round picks from the past six drafts on their roster who were selected by the franchise. Two of the team’s second-round selections over that span remain on the roster, while Giddey, Lonzo Ball and Nikola Vučević are key contributors. Chicago isn’t starting over with an empty cupboard.
Like I don’t think Darnell actually thinks these guys are good - he’s saying that this is a roster full of guys we have been told for years will be good
(The first rounders are White, Williams, Terry, Buzelis and the second rounders are Ayo and Julian Phillips I believe. Can obviously throw Giddey in as a recent lottery pick that they dealt something of value for)
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My guess is they’ll fire Billy Donovan and hope for a turnaround similar to the Pistons, but I dunno about it. The Pistons were held back because Monty is a basketball terrorist and they’re giving minutes to Hayes/Wiseman/Bagley/Flynn/Knox/etc.
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There is no similarity here
Donovan is a totally competent coach and proved that over decades
The problem is very clearly the roster
Not to say they won’t fire him, but he’s clearly a solidly mid-tier coach, and there will be no bounce without a drastically different roster
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Yeah, I agree with you. What I’m saying is the front office probably sees Donovan as the problem and thinks a coaching change is the solution to their problem.
I don’t think they do. This is a profoundly lazy front office whose default is to do nothing. I think they will do nothing.
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This is what a typical deluded front office might think but you need to keep in mind the Bulls aren’t that. They’re so so so much worse. They only fire the absolute least competent employers in the entire NBA after the embarrassment is beyond obvious and after they make it clear they’d never do it under any other circumstance.
Billy as mgl mentions is not that. He’s good and one of the reasons the Bulls have kept it together the last few years despite extremely middling talent and discontent from their best player.
AK isn’t actually under any pressure to do anything other than chase the 10th seed bc ownership doesn’t care to do better and bc they have no idea how to run a modern NBA team they’d just fail anyway.
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It really is hard to convey how much worse run the Bulls are than the rest of the NBA.
If you’ve ever worked at a mom and pop shop and then worked at a large publicly owned company, that’s the difference in competence we’re talking about here.
There’s a reason why when Sam Amick went around to NBA front office types and asked them for their top 5 best run organizations, his sources volunteered to rank the Bulls dead last. Just the Bulls. Not “well they’d be toward the end”. They leapt out of their chairs to say “we know who the absolute worst is”.
Imagine being viewed by your nominal peers with that much contempt and pity.
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Yeah, like, Troy Weaver was, according to me like 4 years ago, the worst GM in basketball. (don’t bother to argue, that’s not the point I’m making)
Weaver, while incompetent, and stocking a team full of sub-NBA talent (that his coach then happily leaned into deploying) was clearly making an attempt to build a team that would win - I think he did it badly (an obsession with former lottery reclamations, etc) but he trie to build a winner.
The Bulls do not care to build a winner - they want to not pay the tax, and win sufficiently to be “in the hunt” for something, generally the play-in, under the idea that this is a carrot that will keep their (historically good) attendance engaged. This means that Bulls will not appear in the “embarrassing” zone of the standings, but that’s mostly because getting the 9-10 seed for the play-in is a matter of desire - there just aren’t, generally, less than 5 teams tanking in the conference. But what it also means is that there is no future, there is no growth, there is nothing being built. It’s a perpetual motion machine of unfettered apathy.
This is also why the Bulls can be penny-wise/pound-foolish on their TV deal (all their games are only attainable via an antenna (I’m not joking)), but in large cities with large tourism volumes, the sports teams can become a tourist amenity (lets go to a basketball game!) and the Bulls attendance #'s seem to be bullet proof.
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Right, it’s no accomplishment to be better than teams that are losing on purpose.
But Bulls fans are suckers apparently. Still 4th in the league in attendance per game.
The Wizards have to be pretty low as well don’t they? They have a couple young players but that roster looks bad.They still have 90 million tied up in Middleton/Smart/Poole next year.
The Wizards suffered for a long time from a similar problem - doubling and tripling down on a team that got like a 5 seed and rode injury luck to the conference finals which was a bad idea, but something that teams do. They, at least, have clearly chosen a path - they have torn that thing down to the studs (two of the expensive contracts you mention are contracts they got draft compensation to eat, something a team in their situation should absolutely be doing)
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