Good morning Chicago.
Read yesterday’s newsletter on the Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso signings here.
And subscribe, and tell others to, for continued coverage of one of the craziest Chicago sports weeks in modern history.
There is a sewage leak in my apartment and it smells like shit. It’s my landlord’s fault, which is even worse, because then he comes over (allegedly to help fix it) and tries to talk to me about the problems with the media in 2021 while I’m eating dinner. He was over Monday. To make matters worse, my neighbors, who voluntarily own town homes in the heart of Lake View East in their advanced ages, think the sewage issue is our fault, and thus are ringing my doorbell asking why we didn’t report the problem sooner.
Ma’am, with all due respect, our place is pretty clean and we light candles. The faint scent of sewage here and there is nothing, considering that I am just a few years removed from a place where a mouse literally hopped out of my dresser as I walked into my room after a long day of classes. Nonetheless, I played the politics, told my neighbor I’d be on my landlord’s case, and that whatever sewage issue was present would be resolved in no time.
This morning, an Uber driver talked to me for 30 minutes in traffic — with broken english — about his fantasy football team. An Uber driver talking to me, at all, paired with him giving me draft grades on Najee Harris in dialect I could hardly understand was enough for me to look around and see if there were cameras planted. But yet I indulged him and told him his ‘keeper’ team was headed for success this year.
When your favorite NBA team has been scraping the bottom of the barrel for years and your favorite MLB team just sold off every single player worth a shit, a busy and good free agency period is enough to make you think of the world as a place filled with generally good people, all of whom deserve success. I may even respond to my landlord’s follow-up email, where he sent me an article he found about how we could rid the world of COVID-19 through an experimental drug. “Sounds great my man! See you soon… smells great in here by the way.”
I turned on the Cubs for the first time since the deadline today, and — I kid you not — Zach Davis, the poor bastard, promptly gave up a grand slam 35 seconds later. That’s enough for me for a bit. But I may even snag some tickets and put some more money into Tom Rickett’s oversized khaki pockets and head to a game soon.
Equal time alert: The Sox made easy work of the Royals on the 42nd anniversary of Tony La Russa’s managerial debut. On that day, former NBA player and longtime Celtics’ president of basketball ops Danny Ainge was the Blue Jays starting second baseman (h/t NBC Sports’ Christopher Kamka).
It’s all because, after a Bulls newsletter yesterday that was supposed to be followed with Cubs and Sox newsletters immediately after, AK-4-7 (Bulls President Arturas Karnisovas) kept spraying that free agency uzi of his and locked in another major player on the market in DeMar DeRozan.
Before we get down to the details of his deal, and what we gave up for him, here are some truths:
The Bulls have nabbed, arguably, three of the eight or so best players that have been actually available over the last year in Nikola Vucevic, DeRozan, and Lonzo Ball. In other years, they may not be in that top-8, but since Karnisovas took over, he’s promptly landed the top talent available to the Bulls — through creativity and aggressiveness.
That alone should be something to celebrate. The Bulls haven’t landed major free agents, well, ever. Now they’ve traded for (and signed, for the latter two) three players that have All-Star potential. DeRozan alone has made four All-Star games.
I loved the Lonzo Ball signing. I loved the Alex Caruso signing. I am not huge on the DeRozan signing, and I’ll get to the reasons why. But nuance needs to be provided.
The bottom line is that the Bulls entered the free agency period in a precarious position cap-wise, and came out of it with a point guard with major upside that hasn’t turned 24 yet and a four-time All-Star. That alone should be celebrated.
Do you want to know what’s underrated in today’s NBA, somehow? Making your team better, and also getting good players.
The Bulls have been dogshit for the past four years, and now they increase their talent by, I don’t know, 300% in two days and all of a sudden we got a bunch of geniuses on Twitter telling the Bulls how to spend their money.
Those are the same people that want every NBA team to lose every game if they’re not an odds-on favorite to win the NBA championship, receiving draft pick after draft pick to make their team worse, all for the (I guess?) non-zero chance that it may lead them to a position where they are championship contenders because they hit on three generational superstars in the draft.
A quick newsflash: that basically never happens. Philadelphia did it best, and they still have not been to the conference finals since.
Here’s the formula to being one of those fans: bitch about the team being bad, bitch about the team getting better, and bitch when the team finally makes upgrades to become good. Then yell DELTA VARIANT at everyone leaving Lollapalooza with their friends and family afterward via social media.
God forbid we acquire some good players, and try to get better. God forbid we enjoy ourselves a bit.
For now, I’ll enjoy the Bulls being a competitive, top-6 team in the East for the first time in a long time. I’ll enjoy Stacey King, who made games fun when the team had five starters that couldn’t win the G-League convincingly, broadcast a club that’s actually got a chance to make a playoff run, making new nicknames for emerging stars and current ones — ones that actually will be wearing Bulls jerseys.
Cons of the DeRozan Deal
DeMar DeRozan has had a fantastic career. He’s been a 20-point-per-game scorer in each of his last eight seasons, and is, as mentioned above, a four-time All-Star.
In the past two years alone, he’s been the linchpin of a Spurs team that had little talent around him, yet still competed for a playoff spot to the bitter end.
But $85 million over three years for a player past his prime, entering his age-32 season, is just not something I’d sign off on.
For one, it’s not clear who was offering even close to that. The Spurs didn’t seem as if they wanted to keep him, and any other teams that could have paid him that much didn’t seem to be in the sweepstakes. The others, such as the Lakers and Clippers, could offer him not 30% of the deal we gave him. Even the Knicks, who do have cap space, could not have matched that offer, or came all that close to it.
For a team that will have to give Zach LaVine a massive deal within the next year, giving an aging star this type of money to be the third or fourth player on the team seems unwise.
It’s not just that, though. The Bulls needed the Spurs to facilitate the deal, but what was the Spurs leverage if they weren’t going to sign DeRozan anyway, and he wanted to leave? Giving up Thad Young — you all know how I feel about Thad Young — plus a first rounder, and two second rounders, is just a massive price to pay — on top of the salary.
And, as John Hollinger pointed out here, the Bulls could have kept Daniel Theis if they knew they were giving away Young (who was on an expiring deal) up to the Spurs.
I’m not sure that DeRozan is that much better than Young at this point. Young is older, but is a much, much, much better defender and provided value to the Bulls in ways that DeRozan won’t be able to. (DeRozan also can do plenty of things that Thad cannot).
DeRozan is also not a good three pointer shooter. In fact, he’s an awful one. He hasn’t relied on it to score, but good shooters usually age better. Scorers that rely on getting to the rim, then, age worse. Paying DeRozan over $25 million in his age 34 season, with LaVine’s new deal on the books, could make GarPax, the executors of a $40 million deal to Dwyane Wade four years past his prime, cringe.
After giving up a plethora of picks for Vucevic, giving away more draft capital does hurt, especially considering the fact that it was for a free agent, and executed via a sign-and-trade.
Pros of the DeRozan Deal
The Bulls now have eight All-Star appearances on their roster, which is eight more than they had to kick off last season.
DeRozan has played in 58 playoff games in his career. That’s 58 more than LaVine and Lonzo Ball combined, and likely more than the entire team combined, though I don’t feel like doing the math now.
DeRozan does something that the Bulls didn’t do well this past year — he gets to the line, a lot. Since 2013, he’s gotten to the line an average of 7.4 times per game. His mark this year was good enough for 8th in the entire league, and he averaged two more attempts per game this year than LaVine did.
He takes a significant load off of LaVine as well. The Bulls can stagger their minutes, and the offense will not crash as it did with LaVine off the court in years prior. He is what we’d call a floor-raiser, meaning that he can make a team’s offense respectable no matter who is off the court. Is he a ceiling raiser? Probably not, at this point. But that doesn’t mean that he’s not providing significant value.
He’s also not going to be the best player on the team this year, as he’s been for many of his teams in the past. In fact, if all goes well, he’ll be the 4th best player on this team, behind LaVine, Vucevic and Ball.
Signing him, and the others, also nearly guarantees that LaVine will stick around. That was not a guarantee originally, but the moves that the front office have made prove that they’re committed to building a contender around him. That is worth a lot, and him signing here at all — just like Lonzo — also puts the league and players on notice that people are willing to sign with the Bulls again. That was not the case in the last decade. These things are underrated when signings are viewed in a vaccuum.
Just as I argued the Bulls should compete last year in lieu of tanking because of perception (that was right), this puts the Bulls in a different tier in the eyes of other players.
Also, this party is far from over. It’s hard to judge this deal when we have no idea what else Karnisovas is going to do to fill out the rest of the roster. It’s very plausible that we upgrade even further in the coming days through another sign-and-trade of Lauri Markkanen, which would give the Bulls plenty of room to get another good defender and rim protector to round out what already looks like a good team.
I’ll drive Lauri to the airport in my roommate’s 2004 Volvo.
There are still ways to upgrade this roster, and those subsequent moves could make the scoffing at this deal look stupid in retrospect.
The first rounder is also in 2025 and top-10 protected, meaning the Bulls would not lose it if they happened to win a high pick. Good teams also do not worry about draft picks four years from now. That means the Bulls still have their firsts in 2022 and 2024, which they can either keep to acquire cheap talent around this core or trade to upgrade the roster even further.
These bigger contracts also put the Bulls in a position (let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but…) to land a bigger star in the coming years. Making salaries match is not always easy, and the Bulls not have the contracts to do so, plus some leftover draft capital and young talent that could land a, let’s say, Damian Lillard.
In fact, DeRozan shares an agent with Lillard, and this deal could act as a favor to that agent — who just hauled in a massive payday from the Bulls — in the future.
I’m also convinced that those that are being highly critical of the trade are not aware just how good LaVine has become, and how good Vucevic already is (both are ecstatic about the move, by the way). I don’t blame them, because LaVine has been on bad teams his whole life (not his fault), and Vucevic has been stuck in Orlando until now.
I tend to view the Bulls ceiling as much higher than others.
Saying, ‘They can’t beat the Nets’ is an idiotic reaction as well. In fact, it’s dumb as shit.
NBA teams should always be trying to get better, no matter what the competition looks like. As we know, it’s a fragile league, and the current teams ostensibly ahead of the Bulls in the East could crash and burn in no time. Things change, and the Bulls are setting themselves up to have significant talent for at least the next three years.
I just don’t feel like complaining about that all that much.
Billy Donovan also proved, again, that he is a fantastic coach this past year. Not many know how to manage All-Stars playing together like he does, considering he was last with the Thunder, where he had to deal with Russel Westbrook, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony and Paul George.
Did the Bulls overpay? Perhaps. Is that better than sitting on their hands, waiting for another superstar to come down the pike that will likely never come? Yes, it is.
Bulls Fridays are about to get a lot more spicy come fall, and maybe we’ll all enjoy one together.
Now let’s go get a couple of cheap defenders and a rim protector. And if you don’t believe in this team now, I’ll see you in May with the receipts.
LETS GO BULLS!
What do you think?
1000% Agree Ange! AK47 Knows what he is doing! Everyone talks about DeRozan not shooting the three well. Yes, that is why he doesn't do it often. As a matter of fact, on average once per game. Who did people think was going to play the 3 spot for us anyway? Lauri? Here's another thing. People are saying that Lonzo is not a good shooter. Are people aware that he had his career highs in points, FG %, 3 pt FG % and Free Throw %? Also, he made 25% MORE 3pt. field goals than Trae Young last year and everyone loves that stiff. Lastly, the strides made by Zach Lavine last year beg us to sit back and let Billy Donovan coach this team and see what happens.
Playoffs and 50+ wins! You heard it here first!
The 3 point splits on DeRozan are what made me less excited about the signing than I would be. I think there will be a whole new identity this year though- for both Derozan and the rest of the Bulls.
He’ll be in a position where he is not the primary or even secondary scoring option. Billy will make it work and we have such a nice mix of scorers and elite wing defenders (Coby/zach/demar and Caruso/Pwilly/Lonzo).
Interested to see if a Lauri Sign and Trade is still in play.