Happy Friday Chicago!
Thanks for coming back to read another edition of Still Gotta Come Through Chicago.
Last week was all things Bears, including a draft and schedule breakdown. You can read that here if you haven’t.
Off the bat, I’ve got a couple of things that I would never say out loud but will say to you all in writing. I’ve looked both ways and am ready to get these takes off.
Number one. Does anyone else find it self-serving and borderline narcisstic when people *announce* that they’ve been laid off on social media? I know we’re working to destigmatize certain things these days, including unemployment, but, I don’t know, I guess I’m old school. If I got fired I’d probably just keep that to myself and try to get a new job. People in sports journalism especially like doing this, as if the world will stop because they’re on the way out of one company. I know these announcements can sometimes be useful to find a new job, but I don’t think a notes app message about the past and future of your career is warranted unless people give a shit. Maybe this will change when I inevitably get canned and I write a 1,000-word post on LinkedIn about my work situation paired with a Batman meme that says it’s always darkest before the dawn.
Number two. The Bulls are in a bottom-five position in the NBA. The NBA Draft Lottery — which I was dumb enough to have some faith in — cemented that. The Bulls have zero picks in next year’s draft, didn’t make the playoffs, and they don’t have much cap room. They’ve made zero discernible changes to their roster the past two years, and the most chatter we’ve heard around the team this offseason is about whether or not Lonzo Ball — who hasn’t played basketball in 17 months — could play again and whether or not we should re-sign Nikola Vucevic, who has been a part an integral part of an average-at-best team for the past two-plus years.
Despite how big of a prick I sound with the first take, the second was far harder to write.
The one and only SGCTC in-person party, all of the Bulls win total OVER videos, the celebrations that took place when GarPax was ousted, and all we got was one 1-4 playoff loss in the first round and a play-in W (which was admittedly a blast).
One of the worst parts of being a Bulls fan is that whenever a below-average basketball player becomes available and Bulls fans and writers go nuts about how he may fit with the Bulls. The Suns got KD, the Bulls got PatBev. You would have thought there was zero difference between the two based on the reactions after each transaction.
Dillon Brooks, who called out LeBron James in a playoff series and then couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a basketball, only to be told he would not be offered a new contract with the Grizzlies, is apparently the apple of Bulls fans’ eye.
It’s all depressing, and a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome. The Bulls run their team like a small market one, and that’s why the fans signed off on moves like the Jimmy Butler trade. We “couldn’t pay him the max or rebuild around him,” and yet, six years later, he’s playing in another Eastern Conference Final that he led his team to.
Another bad thing about being a Bulls fan is the front office constantly thinking about team building like you or me. There’s no doubt a couple thousand fans in Chicago think that the Heat — who beat the Bulls in the play-in — being in the ECF means that the Bulls were also close to making a playoff run. Despite that not being true — the Bulls don’t have Jimmy Butler! — the front office is likely among those thousands of morons.
The Nikola Vucevic trade was a failure. I liked the idea of action at the time, but it didn’t work. Once the Magic pick 11th in place for the Bulls in this year’s draft, that trade will be over. But out front office won’t recognize defeat — which many front offices don’t do, to be fair — and will look to extend Vucevic again for no real good reason. Just to commit further to what already is a sunk cost.
Then we’ll wait around for Lonzo Ball to get healthy, despite the fact that he’s likely more worried about leading a healthy life at this point than he is playing competitive, starting-five-level basketball again.
Michael Jordan is the reason for most all of the Bulls success. Derrick Rose is responsible for most all of the rest of it. Both fell into the Bulls’ lap. The only one that didn’t fall into their laps was Butler, who they promptly traded away.
While Jordan and Rose are the biggest reasons the Bulls have a history of success, they are also the reasons why the Bulls years without them have been so poor.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
The Bulls were given Jordan and Rose — the latter in an unjustly fashion, some may argue — and they ate for long stretches of time. But they still don’t know how to fish, and that’s why we’re led into dead-end after dead-end without the two of them.
Jerry Reisndorf did well in business. In basketball, he was born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. Now his son runs the team, who seems to be even more clueless than his father. He doesn’t do much. He, like his dad, also sets zero expectations. If you don’t set expectations, you don’t have to worry about what action to take when those expectations aren’t met.
Sox fans understand this. 2005 was a magical run with a group of players playing perfectly at the perfect time. It was worth it, of course! But it also led to insane hubris in the organization for the next 18 years. To date, their largest free agency signing is Andrew Benintendi for $75 million (over five years), and he is hitting 14% below league average.
But back to the Bulls. There are four ways to win a championship: through your own team’s talents — we finished 10th in the East; the draft — we have zero picks; signing players — we have limited cap space; or through trade.
There is only one feasible option there, and it’s the last one. The Bulls should have traded away their best players at the deadline. I wrote as much at the time.
I hate tanking. I especially hate tanking when you are in a market like Chicago. The 76ers are certainly an example of why it is not a fool-proof plan. But trading your best assets — at the best time value wise — when your team is going nowhere is just logical.
There are plenty of teams who would be happy to take on DeMar DeRozan next year, and give a decent package back for him. That’s especially true for teams with dissatisfied All-Stars, as DeRozan is loved unconditionally by his peers.
You could get even more for LaVine. LaVine is a great player, and he came around again at the back half of last season. But he is on a max deal and is just not a player that is going to elevate your franchise to the extent that the top-15 players in the league can. He’s a great piece to have. I’d be happy to keep him, but it’s unlikely any moves without him as the central piece would move the needle enough to justify that.
It’s the Bulls fault we’re in this position. But to get out of it, and shorten our purgatory period, it needs to happen.
If the Blazers — who have the no. 3 pick in this year’s draft — decide to continue trying to build around Damian Lillard, that’s certainly a trade partner option. Then the Bulls can draft a top prospect, maybe even Brandon Miller out of Alabama, who may or may not have escorted a gun to a murderer this past season.
(Remember last week’s lesson on the Bears draft. It applies here:
Guy with a checkered past — Did we draft him? If so, he’s just a kid. Did we not draft him? Our front office guys knew better. That’s not the type of culture we want to build.)
The Bulls are a dumb team. They should negotiate with other dumb (and, or, desperate) teams, many of which have plenty of capital to give back.
The Blazers are just one option. Either way, it pains me to say — much more than telling laid off people to be quiet — to rip the band-aid off now.
In Chicago, we go from being optimistic about one bad organization to another. It’s wild to think that the Bears are the team I’m most excited about right now. They’re a historically bad franchise — so bad that we still talk about a team that existed ten years before I was born — and had literally the worst record in the league last season.
But we’re BEARING down anyway.
I’m not locked into hockey mode yet, so I guess the second team I’d be most optimistic about right now is the Cubs.
And they have won five games this entire month.
The Cubs may not have been as good as their 12-7 start, but they’re also not as bad as their most recent 7-17 stretch.
But that’s hard to keep in mind right now, especially after they blew a 6-1 lead to the Astros on Wednesday night in embarrassing fashion.
As we’ve discussed time and again here, the Cubs are just an okay team in 2023. They don’t have a large margin for error. That’s why it’s not ideal that they have lost eight games already by one run.
Nick Madrigal is a near-lost cause. My one Padre fan tried to warn me about Eric Hosmer’s worthlessness, and I was dumb enough to think he can’t be as bad as Frankie Schwindel. At least Frankie was funny. Michael Fulmer has been the bane of my existence.
The Cubs need to string together some wins, and fast. They’re not good enough to dig themselves out of a significant hole, and they’re also not good enough to blow 5-run leads late in games and just shrug it off.
There is a silver lining in all of this. I was extremely worried the Cubs would play conservative with this roster, and wouldn’t bring up AA and AAA talent unless they absolutely had to. That hasn’t been the case, even if the activity has been a bit later than us fans would have liked.
They brought up Christopher Morel, finally. He hasn’t missed a beat since coming up. He was the hottest hitter in AAA and now has 13 hits and 5 homers in just eight games. He’s slashing .371/.389/.857!!.
They brought up Miguel Amaya, and then sent him back down when Yan Gomes was reinstated. But there’s zero reason why Amaya shouldn’t permanently be cycled in the lineup. Tucker Barnhart is as useless of a player there is in the MLB right now. Stop playing around and make a future-facing change (that will make your team better now!).
Matt Mervis is up and putting together good at-bats, too. He just hit his first homer this week. His numbers aren’t great now, but those will come. He deserves the reps.
Outside of the young guys, the Seiya Suzuki I promised is here. In just a matter of weeks, he’s turned things around and is now hitting 20% better than league average. He hit three homers in the last two games. He had no Spring Training due to his oblique injury and now has an OPS of .863.
His success remains vital to the team’s success.
The Cubs still have a +22 run differential despite getting whomped a handful of times over the last two weeks.
All of this to say, despite a miserable stretch, the Cubs have the building blocks to turn this thing around. Now, they’ll just have to win games.
Since Luis Robert rightfully drew the ire of the entire White Sox fanbase, he has been one of the best players in all of baseball. He’ll still hit a ball down the line and not run until 3 seconds after the third-base ump signals fair ball. He’ll still cover 100 yards only to almost decapitate his right or left fielder without any sort of clear communication.
But you always take the good with the bad in the event that the good is this good.
He’s only been held hitless twice in May — once being Wednesday night. He’s hitting .400 during that time period with an OPS over 1.4.
The Sox have some momentum, if you can call it that. In addition to Robert’s performance, they are over .500 in the month of May, and could have the help of Garrett Crochet and Liam Hendriks in the somewhat near-term future.
Nevertheless, they remain the funniest (most frustrating) team in the league. The first description is for non-die hards, such as me, and the second is for those of you that live and die by this team.
As detailed above with the Bulls, I get it.
But if I am going to be positive about a sub-.500 Cubs team, I oughta be positive about the Sox — at least for one week. They are only 8 games back in the worst division in all of baseball.
Stacking enough wins to be in the mix by July is not an unrealistic feat.
Next week, we’ll be on the edge of summer and hopefully will remain positive about the city’s two baseball teams.
Thank you for reading the newsletter! I appreciate you all.