Yes, I know, it’s only the preseason, and the NBA has to shut up for at least another 10 days, if not all the days between now and Christmas. But schadenfreude never sleeps! And holy shit, man, the Chicago Bulls are gonna suck so amazingly hard this season.
There, via YouTube, are what pass for the highlights of the Bulls losing by 47 points last night to the friggin’ Dallas Mavericks, who themselves are butt. Do not watch them! The score and result could not matter less, and the basketball on display will turn your stomach. Instead, below, on the left, behold true horror: a list of the nine Bulls who logged at least 19 minutes of playing time in that loss.
Holy moly. Look at these bozos. A WebMD list of possible causes of bleeding eyesockets has more to feel good about on it than this list of Chicago Bulls. Swap out these names for the names of the nine current Supreme Court justices and last night’s final score doesn’t change by more than 10 points. These dinguses couldn’t beat a bowl of eggs.
(Maybe you, savvy NBA knower, have an impulse to point out that the Bulls are without Zach LaVine for the time being. Zach LaVine my butt! That is not a defense of the Bulls! A team that can be crippled by the loss of Zach LaVine belongs in the toilet.)
This was always going to be a down year for the Bulls, pretty much from the point that they made the kinda sorta weirdly admirable decision, before last season, to squeeze one last playoff run out of the last dregs of the Tom Thibodeau/Derrick Rose/Jimmy Butler era. They gave the Celtics a brief scare in the first round, and that was fun, but man, the bill for it is real bad. Butler’s off to Minnesota now, reunited with Thibs; the unimpressive stuff they got in return (LaVine, heretofore very shitty guard Kris Dunn, very tall Finnish person Lauri Markkanen) will take miserable years to reach what looks like a pretty low ceiling. They had to pay Dwyane Wade’s old ass to go away. They’re stuck with aging Robin Lopez—hell, for now, he’s their best player at both ends!—until such time as they can figure out how to trade a ground-bound non-shooting 29-year-old center to a playoff-bound team for more than dirt.
Meanwhile, the half-measures the franchise took toward laying a foundation for whatever would come after Butler mostly have turned out to be duds, leaving the Bulls as talent-poor and hopeless as the eternally doomed Orlando Magic. Nikola Mirotić turns out to be just a guy with a vaguely frightening beard and a good pump-fake. Bobby Portis would have been awesome in 1998, and that is about the only thing you can say about him. Doug McDermott stank for Chicago, and then they traded him (with Taj Gibson) for people named Joffrey Lauvergne, Anthony Morrow, and Cameron Payne, all of whom are crud and only one of whom (Payne, out for months recovering from foot surgery) remains a Bull.
It’s a mess. Denzel Valentine might be a rotation player, I guess, someday? It’s fun to say “Paul Zipser”? It will still be fun to say “Paul Zipser” two years from now, when he is playing in Uzbekistan, which also is fun to say.
Here is the very most depressing thing of all: Sweet-passing Serbian guard Miloš Teodosić, currently ripping shit up for the Los Angeles Clippers, had a verbal agreement to sign with the Bulls over the summer, but the Bulls pulled out of it because, as Teodosić’s agent told NBA Greece, “the team wanted to rebuild, so getting a 30 years old point guard without NBA experience was out of the question.” Yes. That is good and smart. Why would you want your raw young players to get some run with a creative, unselfish passer who could feed them easy buckets and teach them stylish, telegenic basketball, when instead they could entrust the offense to, uh...
It’s bad! It’s very bad. I will keep an eye on the Bulls all season long, for the laughs, and so you don’t have to.