Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Chicago Sports Outlook Grades Part 1

Good morning Chicago and happy Friday!

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Next week, we’ll get into outlooks for the Bears and Blackhawks, the latter of which has a significantly different trajectory after they traded Alex DeBrincat and Kirby Dach last night. The Cubs will be next week, too, as I again ran out of space for them at the bottom of the newsletter, where they still do belong — for now.

You can read last week’s newsletter here.

I hope you all had a wonderful fourth of July. There’s no two things white Americans love more than golden retrievers and military veterans, and yet we’re hellbent on sending both to the basement scared shitless on the day we celebrate our country. A tradition unlike any other.

If you were in Chicago Monday night, you now know what Londoners felt like in May of 1941. That was until about 1 a.m., when the thunderstorms took over from there and sent reverberations through my apartment. Last Monday it was the twerk party, this Monday it was the fireworks and thunder. Who knows what Chicago has got in store for me next week.

Perhaps the only thing that has gotten more functional since the onset of COVID-19 is fireworks, I don’t know what they started putting in those things in the last two years, but I’m not sure the guys down the block who just got back from Indiana should be operating the same level of TNT as Russians invading Ukraine.

Everything else has gotten worse. The gym doesn’t carry towels anymore because of COVID-19 — what?

No restaurant has the ingredients for the food you want, except for the most honorable in the business: Jets Pizza and McDonalds. For some reason soda machines don’t work, and let me tell you, if you haven’t ever filled up a frosty soda only to realize it has no carbonation after you’ve made the trek home, it will bring you to tears.

There’s only two things related to drink that are holy to me: if you have a soda machine, it better have the right carbonation, and if I invite you over to my place for beers, you don’t get to leave until I am literally falling asleep on my couch watching a night cap sports documentary. Only then can you ask if you’re allowed to leave.

Everyone knows that after 1 a.m. is when the fun starts. Someone admits they think Justin Fields (formerly Mitch Trubisky) sucks, and all hell breaks loose. Then you throw some whiskey on the fire just to keep it going. All the while, my guests don’t even realize I’m playing them like string dolls.

Throw out a take, ask if anyone wants some bourbon, and let the rebuttal takes and the dark stuff go to work! Your reward? Friends sticking around for the next few hours.

The pulse of a sports city is not on the radio, it’s not on a blog and it’s not in a newspaper. No, it’s what people say when they’re banged up watching YouTube highlights of their favorite former athletes at 2 a.m., the music turned down because the conversation has heated up.

That’s when you put the children to bed and let the real sports talkers clear out and go one on one. No help defense.

Your ability to make a point concisely, clearly and loud enough to emasculate your opponent — but not loud enough to wake up the neighbors — is what makes or breaks you.

The last thing you want is to be the subject of the conversation the next day: “He was trying to say Kyrie Irving was better than Steph Curry, and was too drunk to remember that Kyrie went to Duke.”

You can’t crumble under the pressure and/or the alcohol. Because then inevitably, I get a call from one buddy the next day about you. And as an aside: For some reason, despite talking to that friend on the phone approximately 1,000 times throughout this little life of mine, we still haven’t found a serious and appropriate way to say goodbye.

All of this is to say — (this could be the alternate title of the newsletter) — when you want the pulse of the city, you’ve got to be in the trenches. You can’t be a guy in L.A. reading the Athletic every day, saying, “hey that DraftKings Sportsbook they’re building at Wrigley Field kind of looks cool, the fans back home must love that.” Because I know damn well I got a dozen contacts in my phone who may blow that thing up with a bomb if they were given the detonator and a 50% chance to get off scot-free.

I’d like to think this newsletter can encapsulate that — what the analytics are saying, what the eye test is saying, what the players are saying, and, as important, what the drunks are saying.

So in order to write about the near-term outlooks of two teams today — and three teams next week — I’ve consulted with all of those.

Hope you enjoy. I am not the end-all-be-all here, either. Please drop in the comments below if you see flaws in my thinking or feel like there’s something to add.

Let’s get into it.

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But first, a word on conference realignment in the Big Ten.

There’s no atheists in fox holes, everyone is a socialist until their first pay check, and everyone is a capitalist until its Saturday and they’re a college football fan.

For years, there was a collective cognitive dissonance among college football fans. Players — albeit, a small percentage of them — were generating far more than the scholarship money they were seeing from their universities and everybody knew that.

Dumbfuck Dabo Swinney was demanding he make well into eight figures while pining for things to remain the same.

One can wish that college football would never change, that it was like it was in 2006, or 1986, or 1966, forever, and also admit the aforementioned cognitive dissonance.

Somehow a free market was the answer to everything in the country except for its greatest game.

Now we have a free market, and it’s caused chaos. That does not mean that not allowing players to capitalize off of their name, image, and likeness was ever the right way to go about things. Just because reconstruction was hard and messy doesn’t mean that Abraham Lincoln didn’t have the right idea.

But now that they can make their money, the rest of the power brokers have stopped shying away from the fact that college football is every major university and conference’s biggest money-making machine, not even to mention the NCAA.

The facade has fallen and now everyone is scrambling — players, colleges, conferences, coaches, and boosters — unafraid to say the quiet part out loud.

That’s changed a lot about college football, and now, we’re getting UCLA and USC in the Big Ten. You’ll hear people say it makes sense, which it does, if all you are thinking about is the money. But the truth is that the people that run this shit have never viewed the game as purely as the fans have. And that’s the bummer.

There should not be a single university in the Big Ten that could feasibly have students hosting an outdoor pool party the same day that Ohio State and Michigan play. The idea that could be feasible moving forward absolutely disgusts me.

Big Ten tailgates are for drunk, pale, disgusting Midwesterners, not for pristine pieces of shit microdosing LSD and listening to house music in bathing suits by the pool. No offense, to either party.

Yes, this isn’t the start of conference realignment. Conferences have been realigning for decades. The Big East’s football conference falling was one of the first modern dominos to fall, and adding Rutgers and Maryland was ridiculously stupid, unless of course, you’re thinking about the money — then it made “all the sense in the world,” yet again.

The Big Ten doing this to me is equal to what I did to my Dad when I told him that, yes, I had dipped my pizza in ranch before. (It was in college. In Iowa).

Sacrilegious doesn’t even begin to describe it.

And this isn’t a knock on West Coast football either. I’ve cited Pac-12 After Dark time and again as one of my favorite viewing experiences in all of sports.

But in addition to campuses and crowds, the characteristics of each region, each conference, and each fanbase is what makes college football — in my opinion — superior to the NFL.

If you turn it into the NFL’s business model — hungry for TV contracts and as many media markets from coast to coast as possible — you’ll end up with the NFL but far worse players.

There’s value in an 11 a.m. game in Evanston or West Lafayette that is sparsely attended. But that value, unfortunately, is not appreciated by the people that actually make these decisions.

And if you’re UCLA and you have a near $5 billion endowment, but are inching toward debt in your athletic department, spoiling the fun in the Big Ten to make $30 million more per year in TV money makes all the sense in the world.

When the Big Ten temporarily canceled the season in 2020, it was one of my most somber days. Whereas major league sports seem magical up until high school, only reaching that mystique every once in a while in adulthood, college football somehow has a way of hanging onto that magic, and slowly releasing it into your bloodstream a few beautiful fall Saturday nights per year.

But I guess the beauty is all in the eye of the beholder. And perhaps if amateurism hadn’t been parroted for so long, we could have gotten out ahead of this.

Instead, USC will fly 5 and a half hours in Week 5 of 2024, and all of our grandfathers will get hit in their heavenly balls every time they call it a Big Ten matchup on the broadcast.

Next up, they’re going to start streaming College GameDay on Amazon because they struck a deal with them, and fire Lee Corso because he isn’t a value-add in the eyes of Jeff Bezos.

Farewell the Big Ten, as we knew it.

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The Bulls offseason thus far has been what most would consider a disappointment. Here’s why.

1. They didn’t do all that much.

2. They didn’t *really* address the needs we all knew of heading into the offseason: dynamic rim protection and outside shooting.

3. Seemingly every other team was trading here, signing there, or at the very least, drafting in one of the top 10 spots. The Bulls have done none of the first, very little of the second (discounting players on the roster last year), and did not draft early on — thank God, because they were in the playoffs for the first time in five years.

4. Now, the reality is that the NBA ecosystem is so offseason-obsessed now that anything but a frenzy makes you seem like you weren’t doing your job if you are a GM or team president. Specifically, fans are July 1 obsessed, which is the first day of free agency period. We do offseason grades on July 2 for a season that doesn’t start until late October. But such is the sports media news cycle.

And now I’ll refer you to my first sentence of this section — thus far.

It is my fervent belief that the Bulls are not rolling into the 2022-2023 season with this roster. And while there’s a hint of pessimism creeping behind that fervent belief, which we’ll get to in a bit, I’m swatting it away for now.

Here’s what they did do: Re-signed Zach Lavine to a max deal, which somehow is not counted as a “win” despite everyone screaming that he was going to go to the Lakers mere months ago; they resigned Derrick Jones Jr., who I am a big fan of; they signed Andre Drummond to a 2-year, $6.6 million deal, which is underwhelming, but at the very least will keep us from watching Joel Embiid bury Tony Bradley and Nikola Vucevic for 48 minutes; and they signed Goran Dragic, who is still a fine back-up point guard in his advanced age.

In a vacuum, the moves are all fine.

Yet there are plenty of deals still on the horizon this offseason. In fact, there are a handful of stars who are on a roster today that they won’t be on come the first tip off of the 2022-2023 NBA season.

Sorry, didn’t mean to get you excited.

I do not think that the Bulls are going to get Donovan Mitchell, Kevin Durant, or — so help me God — Kyrie Irving.

However, those stars potentially being moved means a lot of dealmaking. And as we’ve seen already before with this current Bulls administration, they’re willing to get involved in dealmaking that can benefit them as an ancillary.

For instance, the obvious one that comes to mind is last year’s Lauri Markkanen sign-and-trade: The Bulls took a piece they had no plan to re-sign, shipped him to Cleveland, who traded Larry Nance Jr. to the Trail Blazers. After all that, the Bulls ended up with a 1st-round pick from the Blazers, Derrick Jones Jr., and a second-round pick from Cleveland.

So, if not Donovan Mitchell or Kevin Durant, here are the examples of players that I think could be available for the Bulls taking:

— Joe Harris, Brooklyn Nets: one of the best three-point shooters in the NBA and a critical part of the 2020-2021 Nets. He was out last year with an ankle injury, but is reportedly ready to go for next season. This is all dependent on, of course, how the Nets end up sticking the landing on this shitshow offseason of theirs. The Nets signed Harris to a 4-year, $75 million deal

— Bojan Bogdanovic, Utah Jazz: also a high-volume sharp shooter. The Jazz owe him an almost identical contract to Harris’ over the next few years. Both are reasonable and both would be worth it to fill a need for the Bulls.

Those are just examples, but you get the point: as long as the NBA puzzle is not completely set for the season, the Bulls have a chance at upgrading their roster.

They also have Coby White and a first-round pick from the Portland Trail Blazers. They do have Pat Williams, but as we discussed before, both the Bulls front office and I are high enough on him that we think giving him up now for anything but a major chip would be short-sighted.

With what they do have, though, it’s not completely out of the question that they could land a skilled big like Myles Turner, who would fix their rim protection issues. The Pacers are tanking next year, and if the market isn’t strong for him, the Bulls will definitely be looking to capitalize off of that.

The salary cap also is likely to skyrocket in the coming years thanks to a looming TV deal, so LaVine’s contract likely won’t be that much of a drag on the Bulls cap sheet come the latter years. Yes, he’s had his injuries, but also bear in mind that LaVine is 27 years old.

There is still plenty of hope and I don’t think the Bulls offseason book has been completely written yet.

Now, the one pessimistic point that has to be made, which I am — for now — refusing to consider, despite decent evidence, is that the Bulls ownership does not want to go into the luxury tax, which they are right up against right now.

In that case, the Bulls have little to no chance of competing for a championship in the near-term future, full stop.

After all, here are the numbers:

Chicago Bulls Talk @BullsSource

Teams that have paid the most and least luxury tax since 2002: 1. Warriors $337m 2. Nets $298m 3. Knicks $249m 4. Cavs $179m 5. Lakers $172m 23. Pacers $8.9m 24. Bulls $8.1m 25. Wizards $6.9m 26. Rockets $5.6m 27. Hawks $4.3m 28. Pistons $756k 29. Hornets $0 30. Pelicans $0

But I really do believe the Bulls are not done.

18-month outlook grade: B+

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At the beginning of April, as the Bulls were well underway on their descent into mediocrity, the White Sox were indisputably the team with the brightest future outlook in Chicago, of the five major teams.

After missing the playoffs for 11 straight years, it was about time. They had made the playoffs in the previous two years, though losing immediately both times.

There were frustrations on where money was spent in the offseason, but nonetheless, the thought was that the injury luck — can we still call it that? — couldn’t get worse, while the mainstays would all get better.

Last night, in a 2-1 loss to the Detroit Tigers in which they could only muster two hits off of a 4.5 ERA, rookie in Beau Brieske, the Sox eclipsed the halfway mark of the season.

And this guy hit a homer.

They are 39-42. They are 17-24 at home. And they are 6 games out of first place in their division, which they were heavily favored to win before the season.

Speaking of odds, if they were to eclipse their season win total for this year, they’d need to go 53-27 the rest of the way.

They have by far the most talent of any team in the AL Central, top down. Even a six-game deficit should not be tough to overcome.

They’ve turned the corner this season about 16 fucking times, according to Chuck Garfien, and yet they have actually kept straight forward on a mediocre path.

For the purpose of the exercise, we won’t get into managerial decisions or the slumps or injuries of current players.

Instead, it’s worth considering the worst-case scenarios, and what they could mean for the future of the ball club.

If the Sox completely missed the playoffs in a year with three wild cards, and a year in which they had World Series-or-bust aspirations, that would be subjectively hilarious.

If that does happen — or even if they sneak into a Wild Card spot or win the division by a slim margin and lose early in the playoffs — what happens next?

All hell could break loose. I assume Rick Hahn won’t be fired. I assume Tony La Russa won’t be fired. But at what point will Hahn say that enough is enough?

The Sox have invested in this team for this three-year period. For a team not willing to spend like the Dodgers and Yankees of the world, what is their path to competing if an underachieving roster is more or less ran back?

These are questions I would not want to answer if I were a Sox fan, or Rick Hahn.

Tony La Russa originally committed to a three-year deal, but if the Sox miss the playoffs with Leury Garcia and Gavin Sheets accumulating the 6th and 7th most at-bats, respectively, something has to change.

What would have been an ‘A’ outlook prior to 2020 or 2021, all of a sudden has turned downward in a hurry, particularly if the organization is not willing to make drastic changes.

Put simply, championship windows in sports are short. If you don’t hit on them when you’re supposed to, they vanish quickly.

18-month outlook grade: B (minus pending)

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Thank you for reading today’s newsletter! As always, I deeply appreciate it. I will see you all next week, hopefully for a Cubs outlook post on Monday, and a Bears/Blackhawks outlook post on Friday.

Enjoy the weekend — STILL GOTTA COME THROUGH CHICAGO!