Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
Bulls Are Back, Bears Are Not
Happy Friday Chicago!
I first must apologize for not getting out a Bulls preview or hype video before the season tipped off. I have been sick this week scratching, clawing, and grinding to get to the end of the day of each day.
God sends his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers, and that is why he must have given me a moderate head cold on the opening week of the NBA season. Life isn’t fair sometimes.
For whatever reason I had very vivid dreams while I was sick, despite not taking any meds (built different). Generally, dreams are not funny or interesting to share, but my most recent one was so clear and depressing that it just had to kick off today’s newsletter.
To preface, I have been reading a biography about Mike Krzyzewski, so this isn’t completely random. Not sure if that makes the following any better.
In essence, I was in Cameron Indoor trying out for a walk-on spot for Duke’s basketball team. I remember thinking that if I did the little things well enough, Coach K may notice me and may give me a spot on the team.
I was diving on the floor for loose balls and playing full-court defense. I think I may have hit one three-pointer, but didn’t dribble the ball much because I didn’t want Coach K to think I was a black hole on the court, you know?
After diving on the floor once, I noticed some blood on my shirt. I had chipped my tooth. I shot Coach K a glance to make sure he knew that that had happened to me, and then declined a sub.
I think he may have noticed me!
At one point, my team was ordered to put gray shirts on, and realizing I didn’t have one, I stole one out of another kid’s bag. I am 26 fucking years old.
Afterward, to top it all off, I waited around acting like I was hydrating in the off chance I got to speak with Coach K. He eventually came over and said “you remind me of me when I was a kid a bit.” I fucking blurted out that that makes sense because my dad was Irish Catholic and from the Northwest side of Chicago (he is Polish Catholic and from the Northwest side of Chicago.)
Thank God that is the last thing I remember, because I’m not sure how much more embarrassing it could have gotten, but somehow it would have.
A 26-year-old man with a full-time job — who hasn’t played anything above recreational league basketball for a decade — was dreaming about making the Duke basketball team and experiencing four years in Durham, North Carolina.
To make matters worse, when I woke up, I was actually really sad that it was a dream, despite, again, being a 26-year-old man with emails to check.
I suppose it beats the dream I had when I took a nap after work the day prior, and I shot out of my bed and whipped my laptop open thinking I had messed something up at work and gotten an email that I hadn’t responded to. It was 7 p.m. and no one had emailed me since 5 p.m.
The contrast of those dreams probably has some sort of deeper meaning. Each felt so real it took five minutes of consciousness to fully convince myself they were dreams. As the morning got underway today, I was still not ruling out Coach K giving me a call and saying he’d like to offer me a preferred walk-on spot at Duke the following year, even though he is retired.
If we want to stick with embarrassing and depressing realities of being a 26-year-old sports fan that may be a little too much into it, I was feeling like shit all week, really, until after the Bulls game on Wednesday. I was so fired up about their opening night win that I forgot to think about being sick, I think, and just wasn’t sick anymore by the time I went to bed. (Falling asleep wasn’t easy either, after watching highlights in my bed of the game I had just watched in full.)
This life isn’t easy. It’s not all fun and games having a dream about Coach K and then logging into Gmail the next morning. But ball is literally life, I guess.
Maybe he hasn’t called yet because I only shot one three pointer. A few more points could have made the difference. Who knows.
Anyways. Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Before we do, though, are you tired of eating the same overpriced shit every week for NFL Sunday? Well, I could not have a better alternative for you. My buddy Steve Skrine — of Skrine Chops lore — will be bringing back the best food you can dream of for us all on Sundays moving forward.
The menu will change every week, but this week we’ve got pork chops and mashed potatoes. $15 for two chops and a side of mashed. And, yes, he will deliver!
Email skrinesteve55@gmail.com or text 708-256-3695 right now to place your order and give details on where it should be delivered. He will get booked up fast, so jump on it now.
Look at this shit:
Add another one to the list!
Last four Bears games for your boy: Three losses and one win against the 0-16 Browns in a snowstorm.
Of course, describing these as just “losses” does not do it justice. The Washington game was one of those where, as you walked away from stadium, everyone just kept murmuring “I cannot believe we lost that game.”
The Bears had almost 200 more total yards than the Commanders, 391 to 214. They averaged 1.7 more yards per play, 5.7 to 4.0. They had six more first downs. 16 more total plays and two fewer punts. Nearly five more minutes time of possession.
The Bears were 0-3 in the Red Zone, while the Commanders were 1-2. In fact, the Bears were goal-to-go three times, and came up with nothing each time. Why you don’t use your 6’3, 225-lb quarterback to get six inches between your center and left guard, I will never know. Luke Getsy will forget more about football than I will ever know, and yet, we still see Bears coaches make decisions that are demonstrably terrible over and again, no matter the regime.
Still, it came down to a fumbled punt by Velus Jones Jr. That’s the only way the Commanders had a chance to win. And even with that, the Bears had four downs from the five yard line or so to score and they did not.
After losses for a team like this, it’s tough to break down the game and not feel like you’re wasting your time. For instance, the target of the night for angry fans was again Ihmir Smith-Marsette, and he’s not even on the team as I write this.
Isaiah Coulter has been signed from the practice squad and Kevin White — yes, Kevin White — had a 64-yard reception for the New Orleans Saints last night. Every time you think the Bears receiving situation can’t get worse, it somehow does.
In regards to Justin Fields, I think he played with a lot of guts, man. It didn’t convey as well on television, but immediately as the ball was snapped, he had pressure caving in on him. On. Every. Single. Play. Whether he holds it too long or whatever, I don’t know.
The only guy I felt worse for in the stadium than Fields was the guy behind us who didn’t start someone in his fantasy league who caught a pass in the second quarter. “NOOO! He’s on my bench, dude!”
Relevant:
In regards to “not getting the ball out,” I think that is such an incomplete way to look at things. If you have to process that fast, and you also don’t have any skilled receivers, it’s hard to even throw the ball away. There’s just no semblance of normal timing.
Nonetheless, he did what he could with his legs, which accounted for a major chunk of the Bears offense. And yet, we didn’t utilize those legs when it mattered the most. And, of course, there was the deep ball to Dante Pettis — a beautiful ball — and then we just decide, ‘hey, that’s enough of that for tonight.’
I heard former QB Ryan Fitzpatrick on a podcast this past week, and he was at the game on Thursday for Amazon.
Two points he made about Fields I thought were very good ones.
The first was that his receiving corps was better in college. There is seriously no doubt about that. All of those guys are in the NFL and each of them would be starting on the Bears. And then, of course, they were also playing against Big Ten corners and not NFL corners. There’s a major adjustment there — especially when you have no time to process things!
His second point had more to do with the play calling. Fields throws a beautiful deep ball. Why they don’t throw it deep more boggles my mind. As Fitzpatrick pointed out, there are so many good things that can happen on a deep ball. You can open up the defense for future plays, but you also have a good chance of either completing a pass for an explosive play or getting a spot foul call for defensive pass interference.
I don’t know if Getsy is afraid to do so because of the offensive line’s pass protection woes or because he doesn’t trust the receivers. But it can’t be Fields, because we know he can make those throws. Perhaps it’s tougher to run those plays because of the situation — I get that — but at the same time, you have to generate explosive plays to win, and you have to have explosive plays to make things easier on Fields and raise his confidence.
In the end, as someone said to me after the game, it’s probably better in the long run if they lose these games. But it’s definitely not better in the long run to be non-competitive offensively and have your starting QB go through another wasteful season. That just can’t happen.
And, as we walked out of Soldier Field and onto the concrete next to the lake — with “Bear Down” lit up on the buildings in front of us — it sure didn’t feel good to have lost that one.
The Bears play the Patriots on Monday Night. I cringe whenever I see the Bears on primetime, and I especially cringe when it’s against a team going the exact opposite direction of the Bears. The Pats have looked awesome the past couple of weeks.
Mac Jones is back, though I’m not sure that matters. The Patriots as a whole — and their head coach — is what worries me.
Now, Nick Saban and Bill Belichick are both known for hilariously giving an abundant amount of praise to inferior teams before those matchups. But the one he gave for the Bears this week was an all-timer. When asked about the Bears, he talked about them like it was 1985 for 7 minutes! straight. This is Belichick we’re talking about, a man of very little words.
This was his response:
Just look at the size of that quote.
“This is a pretty impressive young group a really young team that you can see getting better all the time. Coach Eberflus has done a really good job here with installing his system and I think adapting to the personnel they have there.”
He basically goes on to name every single player on the Bears roster. Do I believe him? I’m not really even sure. But I want to!
One player he mentions is Robert Quinn, who the Bears are now apparently shopping. I was all for keeping Quinn around — one vet as a holdover that had a great year last year. But like making a wide receiver move midseason, why now?
Why, if that’s in play, would you not trade Quinn this offseason, coming off of him breaking the Bears all-time sack record? Why wait for a slow start to then do it now and get a 5th rounder for him? I just don’t like the process there.
As things heat up trade wise, I am curious to see what the Bears end up doing. There’s no real point in being buyers, unless you are making moves that will help in the long run with the offense and Justin Fields’ situation.
………………………………………. LETS GO BULLS!
Man it feels good to scream those three words off my balcony on every game day again.
Wednesday started off tough. Mere days after Zach LaVine said he was “completely healthy” and mere months after he signed a $215 million contract, he was ruled out for “left knee injury management” in the opening game of the season.
If one of my non-Bulls fans readers is still with us, they may even point out that that makes absolutely no sense. Injury “management” on the first game of the season?
Well, it doesn’t. Arturas Karnisovas isn’t going to tell us anything, ever. I kind of like that about him. But seriously, if you listen to an interview with him, he genuinely says nothing.
But the lack of transparency here has been disappointing. Considering the contract, what LaVine means to this team’s chances of contending, and the Lonzo Ball saga, that’s just about the worse news we could have gotten Wednesday morning, next to me not earning a spot on the Duke basketball roster.
At first, I thought it was just a plan for the entire season that the Bulls had not let us know previously. As in, they were going to protect their asset, and therefore have LaVine play every three out of four games, or something to that effect. But that still would have been strange for the opener. Then we learned he was out for Friday’s game against Washington, too.
The key words here are “injury management” and not “load management.” Someone is not telling us something, because LaVine technically should not have any “injury” anymore. That’s what he got surgery and rehabbed for. Something must have happened during practice, but LaVine insisted that there was no “flare up.” Still, the Sun-Times reported that a player on the Bulls believed LaVine may have tweaked or aggravated his knee in practice after saying he was fully healthy.
He should be ready for the home opener on Saturday. With LaVine, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference in his play when he’s injured or not, so we’ll know a lot more after that game — whether the Bulls tell us anything or not.
Now, having said all of that, things turned around quickly from a morale standpoint.
After the first quarter of Wednesday’s game versus the Heat in Miami — a team that was the no. 1 seed last year and was a shot away from the Finals — the Bulls dominated the rest of the way.
DeMar DeRozan was not just fantastic — yet again — with 37 points, but he was also active on defense. It’s starting to get to the point where, if DeRozan does make the Hall of Fame, he would have to consider going in as a Bull. He has played his best basketball by far here up until this point. Oh, I forgot, he also had 9 assists and 6 boards to boot. He’s one of the most underpaid players in the league. Ha!
Shooting, driving, and dunking at will at 33 years of age like he’s 23. MEET ME AT THE RIM AND DON’T BE LATE! Man, it’s great to have Stacey King back.
The positives didn’t stop with DeRozan, though. The Bulls played fantastic defense from the second quarter on, led by Alex Caruso and Chicago’s own Ayo Dosunmu.
I mean, what can you say about Ayo? He plays great defense, he already acts like a leader (calming down Drummond after the technical), and had 17 points, 6 boards, 4 assists and 2 steals to boot. In his first game as the starting point guard, he hit the open threes that Bulls players have tended not to hit, and he looked the part the whole way through.
What an encouraging god damn sign.
Then there’s the back-up point guard, a throwaway signing to some in Goran Dragic, who just knows how to play the game of basketball. Four huge threes for him that kept the Bulls in the game. He had two beautiful assists and two steals as well.
Imagine that back court if the Bulls do get a healthy Lonzo back at some point this season?
The other “big” Bulls signing was of course Andre Drummond, who everyone forgets is only 29 years old. He is so — so — much better than Tristan Thompson. Having a big body down there who still has agility is a major upgrade for a team that will be battling in an Eastern Conference full of large bigs. Nikola Vucevic will not need to get beat up on all game, every game.
Say what you want about Vuc, but when his shot isn’t falling, he finds other ways to make an impact. He had 17 boards — including 5 offensive ones — and also hit a massive three when we needed it most.
The downsides of the game were probably Coby White, who did not reach an extension with the Bulls before the deadline, and Patrick Williams. Put bluntly, if White cannot hit open threes, there is no point of him being out there. He was 2-7 from beyond the arc.
Williams played a lot and didn’t make much of an impact. There’s no question he needs to be better, and that starts with being more aggressive when he’s out there with the Bulls’ best guys. He shows flashes when he’s the guy — in the preseason, in summer league, or in games late in the season. He needs to be more assertive.
We’ve said time and again how important Williams’ development is to the ceiling of this team. I still believe in him.
Here is some perspective: He has played 90 games, just 10 more than last year’s 4th overall pick, Scottie Barnes.
He needs more time, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need to show improvement as the season goes along.
Having said that, what a great win to kick off the season and rid me of my sickness. I will also be in the UC on Saturday. I love telling you all when I’m going to games.
P.S. I apologize again for no Bulls Over Hype Video this year. The number was 41.5, meaning they just need a measly 42-40 mark to hit it. More money for my savings. LETS GO BULLS!
Thank you for reading! See you next week, my dear readers.
First and Foremost, THE SKRINES do Chops like no one else. Really miss the restaurant!
I am completely happy losing every game if we are competitive. Lets load up some draft picks and get some free agents in here. There are all kinds of ex-early draft picks who will tell you about the PTSD they developed by playing behind a horrible line. It causes you to change your behavior.
I think Billy Donovan is a really good coach but without Lavine presenting another scoring threat, teams will not let DeMar do that as the season goes on.
I think you covered anything I want to say about the Bears.
The Zach piece sucks. Completely agree that its apparent when he plays semi-injured. The difference of him being aggressive at the rim and bailing out the defense on a deep step back 2. Him and Lonzo's three shooting is missing from the Bulls offense. I know we made a decent amount of threes but all of them kind of swirled around the rim and looked like the basketball was unsure if it wanted to go in.
Ayo is just so awesome. In one game it even felt like I saw in improvement in court vision from last year. Having the defensive prowess of him, Caruso, Javonte, and hopefully Ball coming back in a few months is a winning recipe. Pwill did zero positive things in game 1. Only thing I will say is he had an aggressive take when we needed a bucket in the 4th.