The road to the ninth seed in the Eastern Conference isn’t paved at all.
It’s a bedraggled boulevard of rocks and potholes. It’s a dark side street on the wrong side of town. It’s the road the Bulls wish were less traveled, but they know it by heart.
This is the journey the 36-40 Bulls have been on recently: loss to the Wizards, blowout win over the Pacers, loss to the Nets, win over the Timberwolves, loss to the Hawks.
For the Bulls of recent vintage, this is the way.
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It’s early April and the end of the regular season is within view, just six games left starting Friday night against the New York Knicks, so you can’t say you don’t know the Bulls’ identity: They’re the team that can beat anyone and lose to anyone. It’s the same one as last year, which makes sense as the Bulls ran back almost the same team that went 40-42 and lost to Miami in the Play-In Tournament.
They’re a ninth-place team with eighth-seed dreams.
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The Bulls are locked into the Play-In, where they will play the Atlanta Hawks either at home or in Atlanta. The Bulls have a half-game lead and hold the tiebreaker. If they beat the Hawks, they’d have to win another game, playing either the Heat, Pacers or 76ers for the right to make the eight-team playoff field in the East. The Bulls have done pretty well against those teams in the regular season (2-2 against Miami, 3-1 against Indiana and 2-1 against Philadelphia), but in a one-game playoff, I’d give the edge to the home team. The prize is facing the top-seeded Boston Celtics.
But you know the Bulls will fight. They have the makings of a real playoff team — an alpha scorer in DeMar DeRozan, a defensive whiz in Alex Caruso, a young talent in Coby White, a scoring big man in Nikola Vučević, a wild card in Ayo Dosunmu — but they’re a few players short of a contender. And those players are not really the injured Zach LaVine or Patrick Williams, though Lonzo Ball, who has been out since, oh, January 2022, would surely help.
The Bulls could use Williams’ size and LaVine’s scoring, but they’re essentially the same team with or without them. They were a first-place team, briefly, with Ball, but his knee issues have not only sidelined him for two-plus seasons, they’ve paralyzed the front office, who seem incapable of making any kinds of other moves to shake up a sub-.500 team.
You’d hate to sit at a poker table with Artūras Karnišovas and Marc Eversley as they fold every hand.
Though the Bulls are a playoff wannabe, they are also scuffling toward their sixth losing season — out of nine — since firing Tom Thibodeau after a second-round playoff loss to LeBron James and the Cavs in 2015.
The Bulls’ front office at the time, John Paxson and Gar Forman, were almost triumphant in the wake of that decision. Forman allowed that the Bulls had “some success” under Thibodeau but intimated he was holding them back. Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf put his name to an embarrassing statement that I’m guessing he regretted.
To be fair, if you want to give Reinsdorf credit for anything over the last couple of decades, it’s the hirings of Thibodeau and Ozzie Guillen on the South Side. Eventually, neither coach could coexist with Reinsdorf’s handpicked front offices, but that’s life in a monarchy, where everyone jostles to serve the king.
Since canning Thibs, the Bulls have made the playoffs just twice (losing in the first round both times) and this season will mark their second-straight attempt to advance out of the NBA’s version of the losers bracket.
The…
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