Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Getting Over (Draft) Heartbreak

Happy Friday Chicago!

Clothes come in and out of fashion, trends appear and then fade away. The jock artchetype was cool for decades, and then lost its steam. The hippy had his moment, and so did the hipster, and both have lost their luster. All will return to glory before we die.

But one thing throughout time remains lame: heartbroken dudes.

No one knows what do with them.

It’s a puzzle that cannot be solved! There’s nothing cool about these poor fellas. Even when they join the military to avenge their sadness — winning the highest combat honors on their way — the minute they admit that heartbreak was the catalyst, it becomes a bummer.

Girls eat ice cream and drink wine with their friends in scenes cute enough to be recreated in the movies.

They lie in their beds and watch Netflix and let out a good cry. There’s a romanticism to it.

When Van Gogh cuts his ear off and lends it to the woman he loves, years later people just just shrug, eek, and go “come on man.” Pick up the paint brush and get yourself together.

You’ve got to be better than that. Mental health awareness is another trend that has rapidly rushed into the zeitgeist, and doing away with the stigma of male depression is a positive step forward.

But not if it’s attached to heartbreak. Stop crying, tie your shoes, and go to work. You’re embarrassing yourself and everyone that’s watching this.

It’s better to have loved and lost than have never loved at all, maybe, unless you end up a sad sack muttering through your drunken stupor about how you don’t know what you’re going to do.

We don’t know either, but we do know that you can’t stay here. Go home and get yourself together. Or else, one of us is going to start crying too, and we’ll all look like sissies in this bar that has lighted decorations all over the wall and $18 tacos on the menu.

She’s going through a breakup: “Oh nooo, is she OK?”

He’s going through a breakup: “Yikes. Oof.”

No matter how much someone tells you they want you to be vulnerable, no one wants to see the heartbroken man. Hold it inside. Watch some motivational YouTube videos, get a tattoo, try to get a promotion, but stay off LinkedIn. Whatever you do, do not post on LinkedIn.

And if there’s anything lamer than a heartbroken dude, it’s a heartbroken dude over the NFL draft.

It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, but you get neither if you fell in love with a college football player and then your team skipped over him.

The other person in this lovestruck relationship doesn’t know who you are, nor do the people making the decision. The passion you feel, they’re totally unaware of it. Neither know how bad it hurt to see those two ships pass in the night, to not connect and drop anchor together.

This is why it’s best to watch the NFL Draft alone, with the lights off, in your apartment. No one can see the anticipation on your face as the Bears pick rolls in, no one can see the morally troubling frustration on your face when the commissioner is giving a tribute to the now-dead Steve McMichael before the pick is announced (Announce the pick already!).

The Bears drafted tight end Colston Loveland with the 10th pick last night, and all signs point to it being a solid selection.

But Colston Loveland, and I love Tyler Warren. I wrote my open love letter to him just last week, and everything broke just right for him to land in the Bears’ lap.

If I hadn’t loved at all, if I had stayed away from this draft madness, I would’ve shrugged my shoulders and clapped at the Loveland selection. I would be so much better off.

But instead, it turns out those cinnamon-roasted almonds will go down the hatchet tonight. Just a handful, maybe two. OK, I’ll get the bowl. Friday night’s treats will need to be replaced.

What will come next in this newsletter is my best effort to make sense of this pick.

But you don’t ask a friend mumbling about his ex-girlfriend if he wants to have kids someday. And so, as I break down Loveland in the following paragraphs, cut me some slack as I try to look forward, knowing what I was forced to leave behind.

By week’s end I’ll be calling Tyler Warren a slut, saying he wasn’t right for me anyway, and telling everyone that Loveland is who I wanted all along.

It’s fresh right now, though. So I’ll see what I can do.

Chicagoland changed its clothes overnight Wednesday, and I woke up to blooming flowers and trees this morning. That shit made me happy — no cap, as the kids say. Like one soft mf, I was appreciating the little things.

Now it’s dark outside and I cannot see what the trees are wearing. But tomorrow morning, it will become clear again.

Plus, we’ve got other teams to talk about. Thanks for being with me. Let’s get into it.

Rest in Peace Steve “Mongo” McMichael.

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Alright, big boys don’t cry.

I’m only allowing myself two to three paragraphs on Warren before we all move on.

There’s two words I keep thinking of when he comes on the screen, though: Football player.

Usually, I would want him to fail miserably in Indianapolis. But with all the love I’ve given him this last year, I just want to see him happy.

It’s a good thing Loveland will be far better off in his first year, and that’s because the Colts don’t have a quarterback and the Bears do. At least I think.

I will say this about the Loveland/Warren question. I was so in love with Warren that, over the last week, I started worrying that I was missing something. The draft analysts all had those two neck and neck, and many of them preferred Loveland. It’s just hard to put in the tape and come away with Loveland as your answer.

That’s also why I’m not in the war room. Warren fell to 14, not unusual for the best or second best tight end, but I’m already curious if there’s a red flag somewhere in his physicals that made him drop to that point.

I thought Warren deserved to be in New York with the Heisman finalists last year.

The situations were also different. Michigan — and this cannot be overstated — did not have a quarterback last year. Loveland still succeeded with two quarterbacks who could not throw.

He had 635 yards in Michigan’s national championship year, and almost matched that number in five fewer games in 2024. He’s a good blocker, he’s athletic, and he’s a great pass catcher. He’s Jim Harbaugh-approved.

In a vacuum, I’m thrilled with the idea of D.J. Moore, Rome Odunze, Cole Kmet, and Loveland running through defensive backfields together. Had Warren not been there, I’d have no misgivings.

What’s most important is that the Bears did not trade up, which I don’t think was ever on the table. The social mediasphere worked itself into a frenzy, but that’s the NFL Draft in 2025. They also did not draft Jeanty, which is the bullet I wanted to dodge the most.

The Bears now have that coveted third pass catcher, and he actually looks more like a Sam LaPorta than Tyler Warren does. Warren is bigger and stronger, but he also has shorter arms and smaller hands.

Loveland looks like a modern tight end built in a lab, which makes the fact that he’s considered a better blocker than Warren a major plus.

I want to be clear, for everyone that did not fall in love with Warren, these two were considered peers on the same level. It’s not as if the Bears took a no-name, second or third rounder at 10.

I’ve also gone way over my allotted paragraphs on Warren, so I’ll leave it here.

If the Bears would have drafted him, the roof would have blown off my apartment. But he’s also got so much mileage on him, and is so physical, I’m actually worried he’ll wear out — in seasons, and in his career.

But that will be decided years from now.

For today, it’s back to the process. The Bears got what they needed at a coveted position — to hell with up-and-down Cole Kmet. They didn’t give up any draft capital, and they stayed away from the flashy running back.

More often than not, it feels like the less flashy and sexy pick ends up being the right one in the draft. Hopefully that’s the case here.

And — okay one more thing — even if Warren is a stud out of the gate, as long as Johnson works his magic on Loveland, I’ll have no qualms — eventually.

The Bears offense looks so much better than it did in January. They have one of the best offensive coaches in the game in the saddle, a young potential star at tight end in Loveland, and an offensive line that looks filled out for the first time in recent memory.

The process continues.

I’m almost more interested to see what the Bears do tomorrow. This is a bad draft, but also a deep one, which means they have a better chance than usual of grabbing starters in the early second round.

We will cover that next week.

Tonight, I’ll lick my wounds. Tomorrow, I’ll be able to see the trees again, and I’ll try not to miss the forest because of them.

#BEARDOWN

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The cheap high of a March and April run has worn off, as we knew it would, and now it’s time to deal with the reality.

For the third year in a row, the Bulls made the play-in tournament, and for the third year in a row, they failed to make the playoffs. Even if they had made it into the playoffs, it wouldn’t have mattered.

They are in the worst position of any NBA team right now. And no, Josh Giddey’s emergence in the latter half of the season does not change that. The glimpses Matas Buzelis showed do not change that. A run of 30-point Coby White games does not change that, either.

There is no direction under Arturas Karnisovas, who may be the biggest dunce in professional sports. I cannot emphasize enough how improbable it is that the Bulls replaced the Gar-Pax regime — one of the two or three worst front offices in the sport in the 21st century — with an equally bad front office. Or, at least, an equally bad president of basketball operations.

Even the worst organizations can find a competent leader when the job opens up. With the amount of information that’s out there now about candidates, to land on someone as stupid as Karnisovas feels borderline purposeful.

But not for the Bulls. They’re just that bad, that stupid.

Karnisovas is already talking about finding ways to get veteran guys here to get better, which means he’s again refusing to bottom out to make sure the Bulls stay a few games below .500 forever.

He genuinely does not understand the NBA, which is the first requirement of his job.

The Bulls didn’t lose to the Heat because they were out coached, or because Coby White played bad. They lost to the Heat because they’re not good.

They didn’t make the playoffs because they’re not good. They haven’t been good since 2021, and that was the only time they’ve been good since Derrick Rose left in 2016.

Meanwhile, the Detroit Pistons, who were far worse than the Bulls as recently as last year, are battling it out in a meaningful playoff series with the New York Knicks. The Cavaliers, who drafted third in the 2021 draft, had the best record in the East.

Karnisovas doesn’t just not do his job well, he really doesn’t do his job. He didn’t make a trade for three years, and then when he did, he lost significant assets for almost nothing in return besides Josh Giddey. Giddey is good, but the Caruso trade was awful. The LaVine trade was two years late, and terrible. The Bulls lost DeRozan, too, for next to nothing — holding onto all of these guys to “win,” and then winning the same amount of games without them anyway.

Things have gotten worse since the season ended, too.

Arguably the only good move the Bulls have made over the last two years was the hiring of Peter Patton, a renowned shooting coach who held the title “director of player development.”

This week, they fired Patton. The Sun-Times reported that move was made basically because Patton was not a “yes man.” It also reported that players were furious.

If there was one thing the Bulls were actually okay at this year and last, it was player development. Ayo Dosunmu and Coby White began shooting the ball much better. Caruso had his best shooting year ever last year — by far. Matas Buzelis came in with his weakness being his three-point shot, and quickly developed into a league-average shooter from there. Josh Giddey, too, had his best shooting year ever.

So it makes sense, then, that the Bulls would do away with the person largely responsible for those improvements.

Karnisovas is not low-key dumb, he’s very evidently dumb. Listen to an interview of his for three minutes and your jaw will drop. The fact that he is in charge of one of the largest basketball brands of the world is so depressing, but to the outside world, I imagine it’s borderline inspiring. Truly, anyone can one day be the president of the Bulls — if Karnisovas ever gives up his post, that is.

The only way he could possibly succeed is by delegating to people much smarter than him, and now we know he is unwilling to do that. The only thing worse than being dumb is being defiant and dumb, and Karnisovas checks both boxes.

In addition to Patton, the Bulls also let go of VP of Basketball Strategy Steve Weinman. That leaves one analytics staffer in the front office, CHGO’s Will Gottlieb noted, while also citing a study that suggests that for every analytics staffer a team has, they win .8 more games per year.

All this means is that our only hope moving forward is winning the draft lottery (the Bulls have a 1.8% chance of that) or firing Karnisovas and waiting for a new rebuild to take place. Neither are going to happen.

Karnisovas will confirm his biases this offseason. He will sign his guys, like he re-signed Patrick Williams. Coby White and Josh Giddey will get paid. A couple of veterans will get a surprising paychecks they didn’t expect to come, and ride out another 35-win season.

Their last home playoff win was a decade ago, when Derrick Rose hit a buzzer beater to beat the Cavaliers. Think about how you felt in that moment — if you can remember that far back.

No one cares that so many of us actually bank on this team for some semblance of happiness outside of real, everyday life. It’s such an awful and helpless feeling to care more about a team than the people running it do.

It’s sad to watch a worldwide basketball brand shrink to this stature in a short lifetime, especially when that short lifetime coincides with mine.

Bulls fans deserve better, but I’m not sure we’re ever going to get it.

If we do, only then will the Bulls brass realize that they lost so many of us on the way.

No one cares about the Bulls anymore, except a few of us. And why should anyone? Why should I?

LETS GO BULLS has been retired indefinitely.

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Should the Dodgers begin calling us their daddy? Maybe.

Justin Steele is gone for the season. That’s old news, but it will loom large over the Cubs season until a plan is put forth to fill the hole that he leaves behind.

When Steele first went on the IL for elbow discomfort (“elbow tendinitis”) earlier this month, I knew it was over. I wrote two weeks ago:

It’s precautionary, they tell us, but I’m having a tough time being optimistic about the long term here.

Sometimes, it takes a smart person with some well-sourced information or deep-rooted knowledge to figure out what’s going on with sports injuries. But in baseball, when it comes to pitchers, my thought process is simple — if it’s the elbow or shoulder, assume the worst and hope for the best.

It’s never just precautionary, and no pitcher ever just has a slight issue with their shoulder or elbow that will disappear by their next bullpen session. It just doesn’t work that way.

So now the Cubs are left with a large hole in an area we identified as a potential problem one before the season. The Cubs needed Steele and Shota Imanaga to be money to have a solid rotation this year, and now one of those pitchers has been taken out of the picture.

Whether the Cubs were off to a good or bad start, it would be imperative to find a way to make up for Steele’s absence. But, given how awesome the Cubs offense has been, it actually feels more urgent to fix the issue. The ceiling is higher, which makes the stakes higher.

This year has suddenly become an all-in one for the Cubs. Jed Hoyer is on a lame-duck contract, and ownership has done nothing to quell the concerns related to extending Kyle Tucker.

Given those two facts — a GM in need of producing this year, and an ownership group unwilling to compete financially with the other top teams interested in their best player — the Cubs have to put all of their chips in.

It’s an unfortunate position to be in, and not really a position that the Cubs need to be in. It’s a problem they’ve bestowed upon themselves, one they could just get rid of if they decided to.

Hoyer now has to decide whether to part with more prized prospects from the great farm system he’s built, after already giving up Cam Smith to the Astros for what seems like one year of Kyle Tucker.

To make Kyle Tucker’s year in Chicago worth it, the math around everything changes. Hoyer may not have the luxury of liking what he sees, and holding onto the guys he think will take the team to the next level one, to two, to three years from now.

As Jim Deshaies said on the broadcast the other night, it’s a lot to ask of a player to step up every time he’s at the plate in a big situation. But thus far, Tucker has done that seemingly every time.

He almost seems to lure pitchers into giving him what he wants, too. He’ll often miss big on a ball early in the count, and then drive the same pitch out of the ballpark later in the count. It’s amazing to watch.

On Tuesday, he also made two incredible catches that, in one way or another, could have been the difference between winning and losing in that extra-inning, unbelievable 11-10 win.

The Cubs last couple of weeks have featured some of the most entertaining, whiplash-inducing regular season baseball games you’ll ever see. It’s part the wind, part the two teams playing (Dodgers-Cubs, Dodgers-Diamondbacks), but it’s also a reflection of this team.

They’re one of the best offenses in baseball, full stop. They’re also struggling to find guys that can put together multiple good innings in a row. In the bullpen, but also from the start.

The Cubs are now leading the season series against the invincible Dodgers, 4-3. They’re 4-1 against them on American soil, all without a solid start from Steele.

They’re 16-10 after playing the toughest schedule in baseball through the first month of the season. They have the best run differential. They’re scoring 6.3 runs per game, by far the most in the league. The Yankees are the next best team with 5.5 per game. And this is all against the likes of the Dodgers, Diamondbacks, Padres — and some of the best pitchers in baseball.

Carson Kelly has had an .800 OPS once before in his career, in 2019. He currently has a 1.511 OPS through 26 games.

That may not be sustainable, but everything else is. Tucker is one of the best players in baseball, and he has alleviated pressure from the rest of the Cubs’ best hitters.

The batting order is consistent, and it has allowed guys like Ian Happ to work through lulls and come out the other side. Michael Busch is hovering near a 1.0 OPS, and both him and Nico Hoerner are hitting above .300, which is a rarity in the modern day MLB.

The only hole in the Cubs lineup is at third base after Matt Shaw was sent down. Sure, Shaw wasn’t hitting yet in his rookie year, but he was hitting as much as Gage Workman. And he plays a hell of a lot better at third base than Workman does.

Shaw may have needed more minor-league time to build up some confidence, but I was happy letting him work through things at the big-league level.

Instead, on a team filled with ballplayers, the Cubs have still found a way to work in a faceless white guy to elicit sighs every time he comes up to the plate. It’s like it’s written into Jed’s contract that we need one of those guys.

Too much excitement 1 through 9, let’s get Workman in there. Workman tried to blow the game for the Cubs, what, three times on Tuesday? Nevertheless, the cardiac Cubs prevailed.

(Workman was put out of his misery on Wednesday and DFA’d. Now I kind of feel bad.)

I’ve never rooted for a team like this one. I’ve rooted for a million teams with bad bullpens, ones you’re expecting to blow the game. I’ve never rooted for a team where you can shrug your shoulders at a blown lead in the 7th inning. This team has inspired that confidence.

Anyone with a brain and a little patience knew the Pete Crow-Armstrong run was coming. Without hitting, he was already a net-positive player. Now, he’s hitting.

He’s up to an .888 OPS on the year and has already contributed a 1.7 WAR. He has 17 hits over the last 10 games, five of which were homers.

He is going to be one of the most impactful players in all of baseball, and anyone that thought him turning down a $75 million extension from the Cubs was a mistake doesn’t understand the math or hasn’t been playing attention.

On the pitching side of things, the Cubs did elevate Drew Pomeranz, who may be helpful but isn’t worth banking on, as he hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2021.

Ryan Pressly has settled in, Porter Hodge looks like the best arm in the bullpen, and Julian Merryweather has been solid. There’s a couple of arms for Counsell to work with now, but it’s not an easy job.

It’s also worth mentioning before we part that Matthew Boyd has stepped up big early on. He still turned in a quality start Wednesday night, and has been solid in each of his appearances.

After a rest day Thursday, the Phillies come to town this weekend. Then, we’ll finally get some division play against the Pirates and Brewers.

Strap your seat belts on. It’s going to be a fun and volatile year, just like the games over the last two weeks.

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Thank you for reading another edition of Still Gotta Come Through Chicago. Tell someone to subscribe today, would you? I’ll see you all next week. Comment below, let it out…