GOOOOD MORNING CHICAGO!
A newsletter was not in the queue tonight, and yet, duty calls. Because although I was procrastinating about writing about another Bears loss, the Chicago Bulls again were the antidote to that dread.
The weather in Chicago was so perfect for Halloween this weekend that I almost reversed my post-childhood hate for the holiday. While I don’t hate people that enjoy the holiday and get all sorts of jazzed up for it at 33 years of age, I do hate myself for thinking about whether or not I should dress up as Kim Jung Un, and then immediately realizing that he effectively is modern day Hitler and that that could really come back to bite your boy.
I stand with the people of North Korea.
What I realized is that Halloween at my age is an opportunity for girls to look really good and an opportunity for men to look like absolute morons. You can try to thread the needle, but basically, if you’re not funny and making yourself look like a complete idiot, there’s really not much else to go with.
Even worse, you forget that you may see people other than the ones you planned to party with that night. For instance, after I waited like a clown outside of Halloween Hallway on Saturday for it to open (opened 50 minutes later than it said it would), I settled on what would be considered a misogynistic costume.
Yes, I went straight from Kim Jong Un to misogyny.
The costume was called the “control crusader.” Basically I was dressed up as a remote control that had three ‘buttons’ on it: BEER/PIZZA, MUTE WIFE, and SPORTS. I laughed to myself at the store thinking about the fact that people wear that seriously, then proceeded to spend $40 on it so I could wear it that night.
While I was going for “ironically misogynistic,” it turns out irony doesn’t play when you’re walking to get to the party or see people at the party who you don’t know. Then you just look like a loser, especially if you end up sitting in the corner streaming the Bulls/Jazz game for the first half of the party.
At least I decided against donning a costume of a man that is responsible for the oppression of tens of millions of people? That’s a win.
MUTE WIFE, LETS GO BULLS!
This past weekend, I had four people come up to me to tell me that they were either hopping on the Bulls bandwagon or had hopped on it and were happy to tell me so. The joy I feel when I hear this is borderline embarrassing.
They were rewarded immediately as the Bulls, in a spot where a loss would have made a lot of sense (playing an underperforming Celtics team that shot 46% from three, on the road). Down 19 points with two minutes left in the fourth quarter, the Bulls only rallied back from that deficit, but ended up winning the game by 14 — even sparing us from the usual panic-mode that takes over in the last couple of minutes.
I racked my brain tonight to think of a better regular season win in the last five years, and couldn’t think of one. To beat a team that desperately needed to win, with two stars, that was shooting the lights out and up 19 at home, is the kind of win that only very good teams are capable of. It’s that simple.
This team is legit. Even I needed some validation to begin the season. They started 3-0, but even better, they have now beaten the best team in the Western Conference and won on the road in convincing fashion.
They’ve won big. They’ve won close. They’ve come back.
That rough schedule that they started on Thursday against the Knicks, a 13-game stretch of virtually all playoff-projected teams? It turns out it’s those teams that should be shaking in their boots, and not the Bulls.
The roster construction could not look any better right now, and that’s even after losing Patrick Williams for 4-6 months with a dislocated wrist. Immediately after that heartbreaking news, Derrick Jones Jr., Ayo Dosunmu, and Javonte Green stepped up and filled in seamlessly.
It’s not to minimize Williams’ injury. I love him as a player, and this season was going to be so important for him. I still think his ceiling is what could take this Bulls team to a championship-contention level. But for now, Arturas Karnisovas is looking like the genius that we’ve chalked him up to be.
DeMar DeRozan has been one of the best offensive players in all of basketball thus far. He’s averaging 26/6/4, and has been crucial to the Bulls half court offense during times when its stalled. His game is entirely different from when he was in Toronto, and even then, he was an All-Star.
But his game now fits so perfectly with the Bulls, which you wouldn’t have known if you read the headlines from this offseason.
What he lacks defensively he more than makes up for on the offensive end, and though he relies on rim scoring and incredibly efficient midrange jumpers, he’s also shooting threes well! He’s making 41% of them thus far, on about 2.5 attempts per game.
Zach LaVine’s numbers have also barely dipped, and he’s proven to be a great teammate that has zero qualms about another scorer being imbedded in the offense. While people wondered whether LaVine would allow a DeRozan to fit in, he was probably thanking God that he had someone else to take the load off of him.
No player on the roster right now is without a defined role. Ayo, who I thought wouldn’t play much at all this year, did not miss a field goal tonight and hit a couple crucial, big-time shots. He’s also versatile defensively, making up — at least in part — for Williams’ absence.
Tony Bradley, the Bulls back-up big man, has shown that he can make up for a lot of the Bulls front court woes as well. (Though not all of them, again, the Bulls still have a move to make there.)
Javonte Green is 28 years old, but has barely played in the NBA. And that’s a good thing. These are the type of winning players you need — guys that don’t care about numbers, but just care about doing their jobs and remaining valuable to a team in the league. His athleticism and defense have been very evident seven games in.
Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso are just such nuisances to the other team on the defensive end. I mean, the Celtics scored 9 points in the 4th quarter, compared to the Bulls 39.
“Historically bad” — or even bad — defenses are not capable of such feats. This goes back to the miscalculation that many prognosticators of the Bulls season made. The Bulls had two subpar defensive players slated for their starting lineup — DeRozan and Vucevic. Vucevic has actually posted good defensive numbers this year, and DeRozan has done enough in passing lanes to make it not a major drawback.
But that’s not the point, the point is that the rest of the team was actually made up with good defenders, and that was completely glossed over. Ball, Caruso, Green, Jones Jr., Bradley, Alize Johnson, Troy Brown Jr…. those guys are all plus defenders.
The Bulls have great offensive players, and a bunch of role players that make up for their weaknesses. This was all deliberate.
Here’s, again, what I wrote on the eve of the season. In point no. 2 of why the Bulls would be good:
Sure, Nikola Vucevic and DeMar DeRozan are not good defenders. They are also All-Stars and two of the best offensive players the Bulls have had in the last five years. But that’s besides the point. Are we really saying that adding those two players will make the Bulls an atrocious defensive team? Let’s look what else they added: Alex Caruso, who is an All-NBA caliber defender; Lonzo Ball, who has some of the best defensive instincts in the entire league; Derrick Jones Jr., who adds defensive wing help that the Bulls severely lacked last year; Tony Bradley and Alize Johnson, who albeit lack size, will be somewhat of a panacea to the defensive woes that Nikola Vucevic may create. Outside of that, LaVine is also sure to be a better defender this year — and he was already light years better last year! LaVine was one of the top on-ball defenders on Team USA this past summer. Now that he won’t have to do everything on offense, he will also have the ability to exert more energy on the other side of the court. The most important point, though, is that Billy Donovan has never ran a bad defensive team. With Oklahoma City, here is how Donovan’s team’s ranks defensively for each year, beginning with his first in the NBA: 13th, 10th, 9th, 4th, 7th. That is all with plenty of player movement and a player in Russel Westbrook who doesn’t play much defense at all. If the Bulls are bad at defense this year — which many are just shoeing in — it would actually be a surprise.
All of this is coming to fruition. It’s early, but I can’t see the Bulls getting worse as they mesh over the course of the season. Billy Donovan has done an incredible job of getting these guys on track early on, which is not easy when you have an entirely new team.
The Bulls won their first four games and we were all told, somewhat reasonably, to take a step back from our excitement. They promptly lost to a very good Knicks team, but even then, they lost at the buzzer after an improbable 4th quarter comeback. They then beat the previously undefeated Jazz, and then beat the Celtics on the road after trailing by 19.
When the Bulls were down 19, I wasn’t mad. They weren’t doing everything great, but there are “shooting variance” nights, where a team is shooting well enough from three — through no real fault of the other team — that it just ends up in a loss. You shrug your shoulders and move on, for it’s a long season.
That’s when the thing that makes this Bulls team different from previous teams came in though, the part that makes me believe this team could truly be special. It’s that intangible want-to.
The bench wasn’t scared of the prospects of losing, they fought back, tipped passes, and got out on the break. Then the starters closed it. Not every team can do that.
Seven games in and I am loving every minute of watching this team play. Can’t wait until Wednesday.
LETS GO BULLS!
If you have any mailbag questions for me about the Bulls, ask them in the comments. Or, add your own thoughts.
As frustrating as it was watching the Bears lose in a game where the 49ers did not punt the ball once, Sunday’s game was probably the best case scenario for the Bears long-term future — as dumb as that sounds.
I’ve reiterated time and again that I am not a “let’s lose” guy, and I rooted as hard as ever for the Bears on Sunday.
But the Bears lost again, proving again that this administration has failed to build a winner, and meanwhile, Justin Fields played his best game of the season and built some real momentum moving forward.
In the end, if you block out all of the noise and dumb Matt Nagy soundbites, that’s what the sole focus should be: if Fields isn’t the guy, nothing else about this season really matters.
And I have plenty of faith that he is.
As the Cowboys backup QB Cooper Rush threw for more yards and touchdowns than any Bears QB has this year, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much a quarterback’s situation matters. (I’ll omit Mike White’s success here.)
We regularly see QBs with far less talent than Fields succeed under good coaches and good schemes. Fields has neither, and still has been able to show his potential through it all at times this season — especially on Sunday, and especially on that scramble touchdown, which was the embodiment of him shining through in a bad situation.
By the way — a quick tangent on the juxtaposition between Billy Donovan and Matt Nagy here. When Pat Williams got hurt, the next day, we were given an exact timeline of his injury — 4-6 months with a chance to return for the playoffs. Additionally, we got detailed answers from Donovan that day on how he planned to mitigate that loss, including who may get more minutes, and what strategies they might deploy to make sure Williams absence wasn’t a disaster. It was such a breath of fresh air, considering that we never know any details about any injury with the Bears, and we never get a clear answer as to what the Bears are doing to fix issues. Perhaps its because they just don’t have those answers.
As for the rest of the Bears season, it’s abundantly clear that they should be trading almost everything of any worth away today. The trade deadline is set for 3 p.m. CT. If the Bears had any self awareness, they’d be on the phones recouping picks that they’ve given away for guys like Khalil Mack, Robert Quinn, Allen Robinson, and anyone else that could get a reasonable haul back.
I don’t want to give away guys like Mack and Robinson, but it’s clear that they are worth more to us at this point as trade pieces than they are on the field. Them playing will not affect the Bears in a positive enough way to justify keeping them. This team is going nowhere. Protect the QB, and set yourselves up for the future as best you can.
The Bears have one of the worst cap and draft capital situations in all of football right now, and they are 3-5. That alone proves that basically no one in Halas Hall should have a job in the near-term future.
To make matters worse, they are on national television next week. God help us all, but most importantly, God help Justin Fields.
Photo credit: Chicago Bulls
BTW, Andrew Muted me for a couple of weeks and sent me a newsletter without an option to Leave a Comment. That being said, I have to give him credit because I didn't know how good DeRozan was, didn't realize how good of a defender Ball and Caruso were and didn't believe any of these role players were any good. I stand corrected. My 50 win season prediction seems pretty low right now.
Agree totally about the Bears. They can start by firing Nagy today. I have bitched about him since day 1. I can't believe that a professional organization cannot notice that every time you remove him from something the situation improves dramatically. Change play callers, offense gets better. Nagy gets Covid, all of the sudden Fields runs for 120 yards. The list goes on. Fire him now before he does more damage!
Lastly, what happened 5 years ago today!?!? Can you believe we have fallen this far?
Oh, and Hawks won!?!?!
As you touched on, not just 6-1, but 6-1 with some very important games, in the way they've won each. In the Raptors game there is value to having that experience, early learning in closing out games. Against the Knicks, coming back from a 10 point deficit late, maintaining a lead against the Jazz and closing out, and of course last night being the biggest of them all.
As far as Pwilly goes, the second and third quarters alone were evidence that we need another piece. It was awesome to see Bradley and Jones step up defensively, along with Ayo's night, but defensively in the post we're going to need another piece. Easy to look ahead at the gauntlet but one game at a time, I like our chances against Philly tomorrow. LETS GO BULLS.