Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
Analyzing DeRozan's Historic Season; Quinn's Record
Good morning Chicago and Happy New Year!
The new year is something I’ve long felt conflicted about.
On one end, the idea that an imaginary date line — one that is different even state by state — represents a legitimate moment in our lives, is ridiculous on the surface.
New Years’ resolutions are corny and fruitless often times, but that does not mean I myself haven’t indulged on numerous occasions, nor does it mean I won’t be this year as well.
(They are also like grown men wearing sports uniforms at sports games, or using the proper noun “We” to discuss your favorite sports teams. There’s merit in the argument against both of those, but the beholders of that argument are so snide and pompous that I’ve almost done a 180 on the whole thing. Plus, I will never stop saying “We” when discussing teams I probably think about more than the actual people on the teams.)
At the same time, there’s something, how do I put this, romantic about the turn of the year. People in large crowds all celebrate together making it to a new year. Especially over the last couple years, that has represented an actual achievement for a large sect of the population. And more power to them.
People kiss each other on the lips, take shots of alcohol, and willingly wear some of the worst clothing and accessories you’ll ever see in your life.
But there’s still something wonderful about everyone shutting the hell up about everything else in the world for a moment in time to celebrate something together, whether it has any inherent meaning or not.
It also means something much different in Chicago, however. The new year welcomes in by far the worst stretch of the year.
Half of the reason St. Patricks Day is such a celebrated holiday in Chicago is because it’s the light at the end of the tunnel.
Thank the Lord, we have made it past the worst of the year. In Chicago, St. Patricks Day is really when we should celebrate the new year. There are things to look forward to for the rest of year, where as after New Years, there’s only a waning football season that our team doesn’t participate in and mountains of ice and snow to trudge through on the way to the gym or work, as time idly passes by, for some reason, so much slower than it does in the rest of the year.
Russia has, much to my chagrin, invaded every book store worth going to in the last five years. It and COVID, as well as the 236th, 237th, 238th, 239th and 240th book on Donald Trump are basically all you see until you parse your way back to something you may actually want to read.
(People actively reading multiple books on the COVID-19 pandemic should all be placed on a no-fly list and potentially in their own state away from everyone else, no offense.)
But while Russia and its literary success has invaded our book stores, it is no stranger to being on the other side invasions.
In fact, some of the most famous invasions in world history have been thwarted in Russia.
The two most famous generals from those days have been facetiously dubbed Generals Janvier and Février — in english, General January and General February.
Napoleon and Hitler both fell to those two generals, but they are lesser individuals than you and I.
They couldn’t handle a little cold and snow in Russia, and meanwhile, we all collectively made it through a winter last year in Chicago where you could literally do nothing.
Take moment to think about that, unless it invokes some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that you’ve buried.
Not only did we brave the awful weather and tribulations that Chicago’s General January and General February brought with them, we also were stripped of the only thing that brings us (perceived) joy during those months — bars and restaurants.
Looking back on it, that feat — living in Chicago in January and February of 2021 — is utterly insane and worth telling our kids or grandkids about.
In retrospect, I really have trouble understanding how we got through it.
One person said to me, “All we usually do in these months is get wasted at the bars.” I laughed and then as each weekend approached I pondered heavily if there was a single thing I may be able to muster up some excitement for.
I seldom came up with one.
This year, things are at least open, unless of course you are not vaccinated. I’m sure it will be extremely hard to get into a bar without a vaccine card that’s hardly visible on the phone you flash to the bouncer, host, or hostess.
But also, the Bulls are the first seed in the Eastern Conference.
And if you ever consider whether you should back off sports — perhaps that’s a dumb resolution you have — think again and realize that DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine are going to throw us on their backs and get us to St. Patricks Day.
As the New Year gets underway, there is no Eastern Conference team within a game of your Chicago Bulls.
This city was structured on the idea of good sports teams, good bars and restaurants, and great summers.
In the winter, the latter is out the window, for obvious reasons. Last year, the bars and restaurants were basically not there, either.
The sports teams had failed us as well.
Chicago was not holding up its end of the bargain to its citizens.
It’s kind of like my father told my brothers and I as we faced the prospect of prematurely balding a few years back: “Boys, you can be bald. You can be fat. But both, that’s tough, as I would know.”
(He’s too hard on himself.)
Chicago was fat, bald, and a real miserable prick last year. The holy trinity of shit.
This year, thanks to The Bulls Renaissance, as I once dubbed it, we won’t be facing the holy trinity of shit. At the very least, we’ll have the Bulls. And we’ll have the bars. And the restaurants.
And for the love of God, we’ll have each other this time around.
Let’s have a hell of a year — to hell with Janvier and Février.
Every once in a while I’ll open up a newsletter with an intro like that and sort of laugh at someone opening it for the first time, thinking, ‘What the absolute fuck did I just read?’
Nevertheless, I hope you made it here.
Over the weekend, as new years parties and football took precedent for many, the Bulls and DeMar DeRozan were busy winning two games they arguably had no business winning.
DeRozan became the first player in NBA history to hit two buzzer beaters in consecutive nights, with Larry Bird being the only other player to do so in two consecutive games.
The first shot, against Indiana, was one of the most bizarre game-winning shots I can remember watching live. The kind that your father couldn’t even enjoy because he was so perplexed and infuriated by what took place moments before… or our head coach.
DeRozan later said he lost track of time, which 1. makes sense if you watched it, he literally dribbled down the clock to two seconds before hitting a ‘runner’ style three-point jumper and 2. is a little odd considering that there was, well, a few seconds left in a game the Bulls were losing.
The second one in Washington, D.C. was miraculous. DeRozan this time knew exactly how much time he had, so much so that he perfectly timed a turnaround to get past the three-point mark, a pump-fake to evade the first defender, and then, of course, a game-winning, winner-take-all three-pointer.
As the weeks go by, DeRozan is certainly dunking on all of the media members who considered his signing the worst of the offseason. But that argument is not even really worth considering anymore.
For Chicago purposes, he’s quickly skyrocketing on the rankings of “best free agent signings” in the city’s history, though the city doesn’t have as rich of history there as it does in other cases.
Of course, the extent of his mark on the city of Chicago will be dictated by what happens come playoff time.
Elsewhere, he’s now being pushed — mostly be his peers in the NBA and by people residing in this city — as the MVP of the league.
That’s not what I want to discuss either, however. After all, DeRozan — even considering the absolutely insane season he’s having, the best of his career — simply is unable to affect the game at the same level as guys like Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, or LeBron James.
In my mind, those guys are in a class of their own, and DeRozan as of right now, for 2021-2022 purposes, is leading the next group.
What’s worth considering more thoughtfully, however, is where this DeRozan season sits among the best Bulls seasons of all time.
Again, the obvious caveat to all of the following discussion is that we’re not even at the halfway point of the season, which is also why I don’t love the live look-ins at the Nets and Bucks scores to see if the Bulls will gain another game or lose one to the 2nd and 3rd seeds in the Eastern Conference, respectively.
But after two game-winners, it’s a fun thought exercise, if nothing else.
It was prompted by this tweet from SB Nation’s Ricky O’ Donnell, who admitted later in this thread that he was not sure he would be standing my his “hot take.”
But let’s take a further look anyway.
First of all, Michael Jordan just has to be taken out of the discussion. If he were a part of it, there’s a good chance he would take all of the top-10 seasons by himself.
Also for this discussion, we’ll discard the seasons of Bulls greats such as Chet Walker, Artist Gilmore, and Bob Love. I’m not doing so because I think their seasons are less great by any means, but more so as a way of evaluating seasons with a more common barometer.
Thus, we’ll only take into account players who contributed to Bulls teams in the three-point era, or past the 1980 decade mark.
DeMar is new, and thus, recency bias is coming into play here. Additionally, this season from him was largely unexpected — even the most bullish among us did not expect the All-NBA season he’s having.
Right now, he’s at around 27 points per game, 5 rebounds, and close to 5 assists, all while maintaining a true shooting mark of close to 60%. (Again, true shooting is a statistic that incorporates efficiency on free throws, three-point field goals, and regular field goals, weighing them all together).
More importantly, however, he’s been the de facto leader of a Bulls team that has won 8 games in a row, is in the lead in the Eastern Conference, and is just 18 wins away from his O/U Vegas total less than halfway into the season.
Per Cleaning The Glass, the Bulls have a +15.7 net rating per 100 possessions when DeMar is on the floor. That is hard to put into perspective.
But it’s also his best year ever. And although he deserves immense credit for his best year ever, at least some of that credit should be doled out to those who have been put around him. I would argue that this is the best team that DeMar DeRozan has played on from a talent perspective, though of course, an argument can be made for a few of those Raptor teams that had very good regular seasons.
Other guys in Bulls history did not have the same talent to work with in their best respective seasons.
For instance, Derrick Rose’s MVP year — where he averaged 25 points, almost 8 assists, and 4 rebounds — came with a lot less talent around him. I mean, though he didn’t play much after the fact, Keith Bogans was his starting backcourt mate that year. He started 82 games for the Bulls and then 24 total games the rest of his career.
The offense was completely run through Rose, which makes the idea that he was even somewhat efficient incredibly impressive. The Bulls were also the no. 1 seed then, and also went to the Eastern Conference Finals.
What ultimately stopped them short is that the Miami Heat, who had three top-20 players on their team, were able to key in on Rose. Once that happened (though Rose still had some success in that series), it was over.
But teams had the chance to key in on Rose that whole season and he still put up the numbers and wins that he did. No other Bulls averaged even 18 points that year.
Luol Deng was probably the second-best player on that team, and he was still limited offensively, as was Carlos Boozer.
The circumstances around each of these seasons, in my mind, allows Rose’s 2010-2011 year to take the cake.
Then we have Scottie Pippen’s 1993-1994 campaign, which came without Michael Jordan, of course. The Bulls lost in the second round of the NBA playoffs, but Pippen led the Bulls in almost every major statistic that year before refusing to take the floor in a key ECSF game against the Knicks.
Pippen’s line was such: 22 points, nearly 9 rebounds, 5.6 assists, and nearly 3 steals. His efficiency was worse than DeRozan’s, but that also deserves some context: many pre-2000 NBA players were less efficient just based on how the game was played.
Scottie is also one of the best defenders of all time, whereas DeRozan is not a good defender.
The Bulls were far better with Pippen on the floor than off, just like DeRozan. They went just 4-6 when he did not play that year.
As much as I really can’t stand Pippen, nor can I stand the morons who believe his and the Bulls 1994 season is some indictment on Michael Jordan, this season is one of the best non-Jordan seasons ever.
The difference is the defense: Not only are Scottie’s numbers more diversified (think steals and rebounds), but the Bulls were also pretty significantly better defensively when he was on the court.
I would take Scottie’s season in 1993-1994 narrowly over DeRozan’s current season.
Then, we have an oft-forgotten season: Jimmy Butler’s 2016-2017 season, his last one with the Bulls and the third of his three All-Star campaigns with the team. Butler averaged nearly 24 points, 6 rebounds, and 5.5 assists. And his true shooting was only a notch below DeRozan’s.
This one is tough. Like, really tough. Just as I may give Rose a slight edge even had things been a tad more even contextually because of the narrative surrounding the season (his third year, and being from Chicago), I think DeRozan gets the edge for the positive impact he’s had on the team overall.
At that point, Butler had soured on Chicago — at least the organization — and became a bit of a diva. He called out younger players for no good reason, and him and Dwyane Wade all but isolated themselves from the rest of the team.
His defense is far superior to DeRozan’s — and he did have a buzzer beater himself that year — but it all culminated in the Bulls only barely making the playoffs, and ultimately losing to the Celtics (thanks to the Rondo injury, FWIW) in the first round of the playoffs.
The same argument can be made here, of course, on the surrounding talent. But Butler’s attitude off the court became a large enough impediment to winning that it took away from his incredible on-the-court achievements.
Then there’s Joakim Noah, who came in fourth in MVP voting in 2013-2014, the only Bull to notch a top-5 finish in the race besides Rose in the 21st century.
Noah’s season is not necessarily noteworthy because of his stats, but in a way, it is. After all, he finished behind the likes of Kevin Durant and LeBron James in MVP voting all while averaging just 12 points per game. All in all, he averaged 12 points per game, 11 rebounds, and over 5 assists.
What’s more worth considering is what he meant to that team: He was the linchpin on offense, displaying his incredible passing abilities. He was the anchor of the defense, winning defensive player of the year, the first Bull to do that since Michael Jordan did it in the late ‘80s.
He also led one of the weirdest Bulls teams ever to 48! wins in a year where Derrick Rose played just 10 games. The Bulls were the worst offensive team in the NBA, but the best defense in the NBA. It ended poorly in a series against the Washington Wizards, but Noah’s effort that season earned him — in my mind — the honor of one of the best Chicago Bulls seasons ever for someone not named Michael Jordan.
It’s hard to take DeRozan here over my Noah, but DeRozan’s pure offensive output is just to hard to ignore compared to Noah’s. And plus, it’s not out of the question that DeRozan could end up in the top-4 of the MVP voting.
Alas, we’ve reached the end — or have we?
What’s gotten buried under all of this DeRozan talk is how unbelievably great Zach LaVine has played the last two years.
This year, LaVine is averaging 26 points per game, 5.1 rebounds, over 4 assists — all on slightly better shooting than DeRozan overall. According to Synergy, he is now the most efficient high-volume scorer in the NBA.
I’ll stop here to say that the fact that Billy Donovan has enabled this to happen is a massive credit to him. Two all-time Bulls seasons are happening during the same season under his watch.
LaVine also posted a 27.5/5/5 line last year, which is arguably on par with DeRozan’s year this year.
The only reason why DeRozan season this year gets the edge over LaVine this year — and last year — is the fourth quarter heroics. He’s averaging 8 points per fourth quarter, and we’ve seen the shots he’s made late in games, and also what he’s meant to the Bulls in these situations.
LaVine has even said that he’s learned from DeRozan’s fourth quarters, which he needed to. If there’s anything LaVine’s game still lacked last year, it was poise under pressure late in games.
All of this is to say that… there are better non-Jordan Bulls seasons than DeMar’s current season. But this exercise doesn’t diminish DeMar’s accomplishments thus far.
Instead, it puts him up there with Derrick Rose and Scottie Pippen as having — at the very least — a top-5, non-Jordan Bulls season all time.
And that’s pretty incredible.
Other Bulls Notes:
— The Bulls postponements of course are going to bite them in the ass. They now have three back-to-back scenarios that they didn’t previously have now that those games have been rescheduled.
— Each of the last three games have been poor performances for the Bulls. That’s the bad news. The good news is they won all three of them, which is a sign of a great team. Their defense has seriously faltered without Alex Caruso, Lonzo Ball and Javonte Green in the lineup every night. Ball is back, Caruso’s timeline is still not entirely clear, but it looks like he could be back Friday. Green, meanwhile, is out for the next 2-4 weeks with an adductor strain.
— The Bulls woes (if you can call them that) are as excusable as they get. They have not had their full team (or even coach) for the majority of these recent games. They’ll get a much-needed break from now until Friday.
— And they’ll need it. Because after they play Washington at the end of the week, they’re set for a gauntlet: DAL, DET, BKN (Back to back), GSW, BOS (Back to Back), MEM, CLE, MIL
— LETS GO BULLS
Robert Quinn broke the Bears single-season sack record this year before the 17th game, making it legitimate as he surpassed Richard Dent, who had 17.5 sacks in one year and 17.0 sacks in another. Quinn now has 18.0 on the season.
The Bears disappointing season was as predictable this year as Mike Glennon’s performance was on Sunday.
But Quinn’s dominant year was anything but that.
I think all of us counted Quinn out. I labeled it a “bad contract” after his first year with pretty good confidence. If he had gotten half the sacks he ended up with, I would have considered it surprising, frankly.
Where the hell did this come from?
The better question would be, where the hell did last year come from?
Now that we have this year as evidence, it’s clear that Quinn was either 1) more hurt than we thought as he played in 2020 2) misused from a scheme perspective in major ways by Chuck Pagano or 3) both.
Even in his worst years, he was far more productive from a tackle-for-loss and sack perspective than he was last year. It’s clear it was a major outlier, and major props are owed to him for proving most all of us wrong this year.
Quinn also once held the Rams single-season sack record. Who did he get the record against? You guessed it! A young Mike Glennon playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2013.
Aaron Donald has since surpassed that record, but it’s pretty incredible that Quinn has held that record for two different teams during his career. Now, he holds the Bears record, which puts him in incredible company.
The Bears have had some unbelievable pass rushers over the years, and yet Quinn’s 18 in this forgettable season now goes down in history.
That was a win for Ryan Pace, who got a ton of flak for signing Quinn to the 5-year, $70 million deal he did prior to last season.
What wasn’t was the mess that was an Andy Dalton-Mike Glennon showdown, quarterbacks he has given close to $30 million during his tenure. The Vikings Sean Mannion was king enough to nix an argument that the two worst, current starting quarterbacks in the league faced off at Soldier Field on Sunday.
Glennon had one of the worst games of all time, which shielded an awful Andy Dalton effort — 18/35 for 173 yards and an interception.
We’ve gotten over the Nagy discussion. He’s gone and should be. But it does feel like we gloss over the fact that Nagy was hired by Pace.
Two failed coaches, four failed quarterbacks. And a 6-10 record heading into an offseason in which we’ll have limited draft capital and cap flexibility.
The proof seems to be in the pudding.
I believe what I told you boys was not to be FAT, Bald and Stupid which is why I read so much. I prefer to think that I am fat and husky.
Yes, I almost had a heart attack when DeRozan shot that first game winner. I was screaming "what the hell are you doing". And this came after I argued with Jack Donlan that I think Lavine is a better end of game option. I stand by that statement.
Recency bias is very real. Not that I think that Demar will regress much but put into perspective it has only been 32 games for him. Also as you pointed out, if Demar were averaging a few less points per game- the convo would be where does this Zach Lavine season rank all time for the Bulls?
Maybe I'm still too in love with the core roster of the early 2010 bulls, but the Joakim Noah top 5 MVP season to me is so impressive just due to his apparent lack of ball skills compared to the rest of the NBA. Demar's offense has been almost equally as impressive as Jo's defense that year, but tough to compare. Wish I was old enough to experience Scottie's '94 season but was cool to relive it during the Last Dance.