Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
An Abominable Trade; Cubs Suck?
Welcome back Chicago!
I’ve been raising cain across the greater Midwest for the past couple of weeks, but I’m back.
And when I get back from a little summer getaway and miss a day or two of work, returning the following Monday feels like I’m back in my obese adolescent body, running from an angry man who has a dent in his car from the icy snowball my friend just roped at him. Specifically, there’s a fence upcoming, and the dread is mounting, knowing there’s a chance I don’t get to the other side of that thing unscathed.
The plight of a chubbster on the brink of puberty is not for the faint of heart, and nor is coming back to an inbox full of people following up on my vacation email a minute after the time I said I’d be back.
It’s even worse when you’ve enjoyed the sweet luxury of missing out on a couple of Cubs games, only to return to a slew of angry texts from friends and family and two ugly, no-good box scores.
With the NBA Finals and the NHL Finals nearing a close, there’s no other way to put it. We’re in for a long ride. I know, I know. It’s the summer. I’ve been getting my sunshine and going on aimless walks while listening to the Country Strong soundtrack.
Yada yada. Before we know it, it’ll be November.
But don’t think I don’t know that — I’ve been preparing hard for election season discourse by engaging from afar in the Caitlin Clark discourse. And I promise you, whatever comes in November cannot be as soul-crushing and slow-witted as what I’m seeing day in and day out right now.
But the point stands. When you settle into that couch at the end of Tuesday night, it’s nice to have something going on the television. Something that isn’t the Cubs blowing a two-run lead, you know?
To pour gasoline on the tremendous comedown from a great summer weekend is the Bulls making a trade, and specifically with the Oklahoma City Thunder (more on this later).
I’m a middle child. My older brother is three years older than me, and my younger brother is three years younger than me. My older brother used to tell my younger brother his butt “smelled like strawberries” shortly before farting in his face when we were kids. It worked, kind of a lot.
Needless to say, Sam Presti and the Oklahoma City Thunder negotiating a deal with the Chicago Bulls match the wit pairing that was my older brother and 7-year old younger brother.
For that kind of deal, someone else should really be in the room to make sure that one person isn’t violated. You can’t take advantage of the intellectually disadvantaged, even if they happen to be the decision makers of an organization worth over $4 billion.
There are only a few certainties in life, in the end. And I say this as someone who only considers a few things at a time, so bear with me. No. 1: if you’re a guy above the age of 50, don’t try to look hot in a picture with your daughter on Instagram. No. 2: if Sam Presti calls looking to make a trade with you, hang up. And No. 3: Uhmmm, you should treat others how you’d like to be treated.
Now, the Cubs and the Bulls are testing my Ghandi right now, but I’ll let the frustration sink through my neck, down through my shoulders, and out onto the ground — and keep moving.
Sports don’t matter, so I’m throwing that energy into those things that do matter. The pursuit of life, liberty and happiness and whether or not that one woman fouled Caitlin Clark too hard in that game I wasn’t watching.
Let’s go!
I know it’s June. We probably shouldn’t be leading off the newsletter with the Bulls. But two shit Chicago teams can wait behind another shit Chicago team for now.
The Bulls made their first move of the offseason Thursday, trading the best perimeter defender in the NBA, and a guy everyone in the league wanted, for a guy the Thunder wanted to get rid of anyway.
Translation: the Bulls traded Alex Caruso straight up for Josh Giddey.
Let me take a step back, and offer a few caveats before I truly shed by outer Ghandi.
The whole world is down on Josh Giddey right now, for one reason or another. Take the team that drafted him and just traded him, for example. He averaged 31.5 minutes per game his rookie year, 31 his sophomore year and 25 in his third year. In the playoffs this year, he played these minutes in the first round: 19, 31, 25, 29. In the following series against Dallas, he played these minutes: 16, 10, 13, 12, 11, 10.
Having said that, I do like Josh Giddey’s play style in a vacuum. He has a solid understanding of the game, and can get you decent numbers in all three major categories: points, rebounds, and assists. Even though he played less this year, if you adjust his numbers to per 36 minutes (likely what he’ll be playing with the Bulls), he averaged 17.7 points, 6.9 assists, and 9.2 rebounds.
He’s a decent player, and he’s also 21 years old. To boot, it’s worth mentioning he was playing this year with an NBA investigation over his head, which was later resolved. He was being boo’d at every away stadium. I’m not here to dictate whether those boos were deserved or not, just to point out it was probably not an easy year for him psychologically.
On the other end, Caruso is now on the wrong side of 30. He hasn’t actually missed *a ton* of games — he played 41, 67, and 71 in his three years with the Bulls — but he is hurt a lot. Those injuries can generally be chalked up to his awesome, aggressive style of play, but they’re still a consideration.
He’s probably my favorite Bulls player since Joakim Noah (or Cristiano Felicio), but he needed to be traded. He has one year left on his deal, immense value, and will not contribute to a Bulls team worth a shit during his time here.
Now I’m shedding the Ghandi layer.
When I initially saw the trade, I thought it was bad. Throughout the last few hours, I’ve let it marinate. It’s actually one of the worst trades I’ve seen in the NBA in a long, long time.
It’s hard to pick a spot to start. But let’s start here. Every team, and I mean every team, wants Alex Caruso. That’s not an exaggeration. There’s not a system or a squad he wouldn’t immediately make better. The Bulls were so much better defensively when he was on the floor during his time in Chicago that sometimes the On/Off numbers looked like errors. Watching the games made that even more clear. The winning plays — not even to mention the rub-off he had on his teammates — were truly immeasurable.
All reports indicated that, over the last two years, if the Bulls were to have traded him at the deadline, they would have netted at least two first-round picks.
But CHGO’s Will Gottlieb reported last week that the Bulls had an ownership-directed push to make the playoffs last year, despite the mound of evidence suggesting they were a bad team going nowhere.
On any other day, that would have been the lead of this Bulls section, but we’ll have to move on from the moron Reinsdorfs for now in favor of nuts and bolts around this trade.
The Bulls traded Caruso at the worst possible time. The only player situation mismanaged more in the NBA this year was, well, Zach LaVine. DeMar DeRozan is a close third.
Instead, they got no draft picks, which are both prime capital in the NBA — particularly for bad teams like the Bulls — but also a scarce resource for the Bulls right now.
To make matters much, much worse, the Thunder have more draft capital than any other team in the NBA.
I mean, seriously, this is the team we just got no draft picks from in a trade that sent arguably our most valuable player elsewhere.
2024 — One first-round draft pick
2025 — FIVE first-round draft picks, two second-round draft picks
2026 — One first-round draft pick, three second-round draft picks
2027 — THREE first-round draft picks, two second-round draft picks
2028 — Two first-round draft picks, three second-round draft picks
2029 — Two first-round draft picks, six second-round draft picks
The Bulls could not finagle one of those 14 first-round or 16 second-round draft picks in the next three years out of their most coveted player.
Let’s keep going. A player for player trade when you’re rebuilding is already dumb. It’s particularly dumb if it’s for a player that the Thunder legitimately were looking to offload. Everyone in the NBA knew the Thunder were moving off Giddey, and they just so happened to get a two-time All-Defensive player out of it who shot 41% from three last year.
(Quickly, Giddey cannot shoot. He shot 33% from three last year, and he’s also afraid to take threes. He has taken 214 threes in his career, and 82% of those came in instances where a defender was not within six feet of him. H/T to Shehan Jeyarajah.)
If there’s one thing the Bulls don’t need, it’s less shooting.
In a just world, the Bulls are getting back multiple picks for Caruso, plus a player of Giddey’s caliber.
This is already something we knew, but this trade makes it crystal clear: The Reinsdorfs are the overarching cancer that plagues the Bulls. But, it’s not as if they’ve hired good basketball minds that have been handicapped by them. They’ve handicapped them, certainly, but even when they’re free to make the team better — they can’t.
Put it this way. The ownership mandate that the Bulls try to compete over the last year and a half is ridiculously dumb. But, if that was the goal, why couldn’t management even make the team better? The Bulls have won less games each year over the last three.
To put the final cherry on top, Josh Giddey is not under contract past this year. It’s not as if they’re getting an underpaid asset. They’ll have to pay him in short order.
Process. Process. Process.
Giddey may work out in Chicago. That won’t make this trade one iota better. If he wins the Finals MVP while on the Bulls — and this is not hyperbole — this will still be an awful trade given the context.
We’ll miss you Caruso. Next up, $160 millys for DeMar DeRozan!
Taking a couple of weeks off from the newsletter in the beginning of summer is not a great idea. Because where do I even begin?
I was never a believer in load management, but now I am. Because when the Cubs have an off day, that load management is great for all of us fans. My head is on straighter that day, and the next.
Every morning, I check the ESPN app almost immediately after waking up to see when the Cubs play. If I can’t find them, the relief that washes over me is almost embarrassing.
They’re currently in fourth place in the NL Central — Yes! — but they went quickly from first to worst.
I am generally a Jed Hoyer fan. But, ultimately, he likes a deal more than he likes a really good ball player. The Cubs are still scarred from a $184 million Jason Heyward deal that didn’t work out. For starters, $184 million spread over eight years is really not that big of a deal in the MLB. You will not hit on every free agency signing. Charge it to the game. Eventually, you’re going to have to take some big swings, even if you miss every once in a while.
By the way, a 34-year-old Jason Heyward currently as an .844 OPS. He had a .813 OPS last year. With the Cubs, the only year he came even close to those marks was the COVID season, over a 50-game sample size.
It’s hard to separate whether it’s Ricketts or Hoyer who wants to make cute moves around the margins and wait on prospects, but one thing is not hard to decipher. And that is that the Cubs don’t have what it takes right now — in a year they’re trying to compete.
They want to slide into the Wild Card and go on a miraculous run like the Phillies or Diamondbacks. Besides the fact that both those teams have talent that far outweighs the Cubs, the Cubs… are the Cubs! Not the Diamondbacks. They should not be trying to luck into a World Series or be on another five-year plan, like the one that was necessary when Theo Epstein took over.
When I’m going about my day or watching the Cubs, I send myself emails to remember things to put in the newsletter. They’ve become especially hard to make out over the last few weeks. Because I haven’t written one of these in a while, it’s become even harder.
Here’s an example, directly from my inbox.
Swinging at ballss with the bases fucking loaded down 4 after walking bases loaded .
I actually found that game — and it Seiya Suzuki hit a grand slam right after that, for what it’s worth. (He also dropped a fly ball that allowed three runs right before that.)
But I still can’t figure them all out.
At one point, over a three-week stretch, 20% of the runs the Cubs allowed were unearned.
That’s the thing. It’s not just the bullpen, which is god awful and volatile and miserable. It’s also the timely hitting. It’s also the fielding. It’s also the base running. The Cubs are just not doing anything that well right now.
I want to make it clear here that I do not blame Craig Counsell for any of the aforementioned problems. These are structural issues that need to be completely uprooted.
Having said that, if there’s anything I know I won’t get pushback on here, it’s that Hector Neris cannot continue trotting out there in the 9th. Even when he was pitching “well” it was due to finishing out an inning with a man on second and third, while all of us gasped for air. Neris has a near-5 ERA, but he also has 1.7 WHIP. You just cannot have a “closer” going out there who you know is immediately going to put someone on base.
The bullpen is not an easy fix midseason. One or two guys is not going to mitigate the unreliability of this crew.
The Cubs have lost 18! one-run games this year. If the bullpen was 15% better, it’s not a stretch to suggest that they’d be in the hunt for 1st in the NL Central.
That is the reality.
Having said that, if I can strike an optimistic tone for once in this newsletter, I don’t think the Cubs are nearly as bad as they’ve been playing everywhere else.
Yes, Mike Tauchman is out now too — with a Grade 2 groin strain that will sideline him for a month at least — but the Cubs just have had no synchrony with their lineups. Or, as Hoyer would say, they haven’t “clicked.”
According to OPS+, the Cubs have just five above average hitters this year. Tauchman is one of them. But Ian Happ is one of them too, and he was no. 1 on the Chicago FBI’s most wanted a month ago. He’s inconsistent, and so are the Cubs as a collective.
The others: Michael Busch, 132 OPS+; Seiya Suzuki, 122 OPS+; Cody Bellinger, 112 OPS+.
(An OPS+ of 100 is league average. So, Michael Busch is 32% above league average, for instance.)
Guys that need to step up include the rest of the bunch: Nico Hoerner, Dansby Swanson, Christopher Morel, (forget Amaya), and Pete Crow-Armstrong.
But I think you’d be nuts to give up right now on Morel, in particular. He hits the ball hard, his at-bats get better and better. His advanced stats suggest he’s one of the unluckiest hitters in the league thus far. His strike out rate is significantly down this year, and his walk percentage is up.
The bullpen is a ceiling, undoubtedly. And I don’t know that it can be fixed this year, though it could be improved.
But like Morel, I think the Cubs are much better than the numbers show, and I think they’ll be in the thick of the NL Central race in late August.
Even if it’s fool’s gold.
Sometimes it’s enjoyable to make fun of the White Sox. Today is not one of those days.
Every time I go off on the Bulls, I’m reminded of the plight my White Sox brethren are faced with. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and boy do we have a common enemy.
By almost any measure, the Sox are by far the worst team in the MLB.
But out of habit, I still throw them on.
A couple of weeks ago, Drew Thorpe was making his debut. He looked awesome. I mean, like, awesome just in general and pitching. He looked so good that it almost didn’t feel like he should be wearing a White Sox uniform, which is a problem in itself.
I know he had a bad start since, but his first start in Seattle perfectly encapsulates the toxic environment that he’s entered.
After five or so innings pitched and an unreal pitcher-fielding play by him, in which he fielded a ball to his right and spun left to rifle the ball to first, everything collapsed on the young man.
Korey Lee made an egregious base running error. Lenyn Sosa fielded a routine ground ball and launched it 10 feet over the first baseman’s head. The Sox blew the game.
Even when there’s a bright spot — a new pitcher, a new prospect up — it sputters quickly.
The Cubs games weren’t outliers. If the Sox don’t get blown out, they lose in fantastic fashion.
Really, the question isn’t how bad of a record the Sox are going to have this season. The question is when they’ll be above .500 again. Right now, it doesn’t seem like it’ll be anytime even close to now.
Hey, hey. I know I missed a lot. I’ll be here next week. Thanks for coming back to the newsletter — it’s greatly appreciated. Comment below.
If there's one thing Jerry Jones it's that my cowboys need STAR POWER baby! Want to see them in the mix for Brandon Ayoiuk to pair with CD Lmab. My Marlins are at home against the Mariners this weekend.
Man I knew the Thunder had a boat load of picks, but I had no idea they had that many picks. I was just starting to coming around on the trade and now I’m pissed again. Thanks Don!!