CHICAGO BULLS. '07-'08 POSTMORTEM

Welp, the Bulls end their season tomorrow night. Wow. Couldn't come soonly enough. And that's strange for me to admit. I love the Bulls and still realy like the NBA. They won (and scored 151 points) last night, but lost the game before that. So that means that even if the Bulls beat the Raptors tomorrow, they will have gone the entire season without having won three games in a row. That is downright humiliating. Especially in the East. Yuck.

I've never been more at a loss as to what happened to a team in my life. The Bulls have been known as a good, young, hard-working, overachieving team over the past three years--building toward something special. Two offseasons ago they added Ben Wallace to their young and talented core. That was a nice piece. They went out and turned in a reasonably good regular season last year, but looked most impressive in sweeping the Heat in the first round of the playoffs, then chasing the Pistons to six games in the second round.

So...this past offseason. A little addition by subtraction by getting rid of P.J. Brown, Mike Sweetney, and Malik Allen, etc. Replace those names with big men Joe Smith, Joakim Noah, and Aaron Gray, and you get worlds better. Instantly.

Smith was a former number one overall pick, and brought experience and maturity to the team. Beyond that, by signing he promptly became the only legitimate offensive threat down low for the Bulls--something they lacked the previous year. So you filled that hole.

And as for Noah and Gray...I blogged last year about John Paxson's brilliant plan to build a team of winners and successful college basketball players (see Duhon, Hinrich, Gordon, Deng, Thomas, etc.) And he only added to that last offseason.

Joakim Noah was a guy I loved to watch play in college, and a dream get at number nine in the 2007 draft. After he won his first National Championship at Florida two years ago, he was instantly projected as the number one overall pick in the draft. He instead returned to school, and shared more of the load last year with Al Horford and company. So his stock fell a little. And the Bulls basically got a top-of-the-draft caliber guy at number nine. I remember after Florida's first championship, my basketball-fan-friend Matt wrote to me, "This Noah kid is something else. What an atypical athlete. His speed and ball handling skills at his size are amazing." So to be able to add a piece like that to the mix was to good to be true.

And then Aaron Gray. After Pitt's 2006 NCAA run, Gray was projected to be a lottery pick in that summer's draft. But like Noah, he elected to return for his junior season. He ended up having a bit of a down year, and fell all the way down to the Bulls in the second round! You talk about a dream draft. One guy who would have been the top pick and another who would have been a lottery selection. You can't fault Paxson's ability to draft, no matter what.

So here the Bulls were...young, still on the rise, playoff-tested at last, very very deep, and they had finally plugged some holes. They were ready. More than one preseason publication picked them to represent the East in the NBA finals. A Bulls/Suns finals seemed to be a popular prediction. And why not? There was absolutely no reason to believe the Bulls weren't poised to take that next step after the playoff success they tasted the year before.

But the problem was, the season began and the Bulls were bad. A bad basketball team. Very bad. Like...they probably turned in their worst season in franchise history. Oh there were years with fewer wins, but even the post-Jordan era was less embarrasing than this year's squad.

I remember in the lean years after Jordan...you knew the Bulls would be horrible. But I still hung in there. I still loved to listen to them every night and cherish every win. (Part of that was probably because John Paxson was doing the radio color. To this day he's the best color guy I've ever heard in any sport in any medium. I learned more about basketball in two or three years of listening to Pax do the Bulls games than any other source in my life. He was a natural. As good of a GM as he is, he was better at radio. And I hated to see him go.) But still, you could lock in and follow the team. And believe.

But this year? This year just tasted bad. Oh I still tried to listen to almost every game, and I caught them every time they were on TV. But there was nothing of which to grab ahold. I kind of went through the motions in my Bulls' fanship this year. I'm nothing if not loyal to my favorite teams, so I don't fear fairweatherness in this case. I actually can't quite put my finger on it. It was bad. Very very bad.

Even about a month ago...when the Bulls were part of the cluster of teams hovering around the eight seed--about 2 games out. It still looked like they were the most likely to get it. With the talent on the roster, you had to figure a five or six game winning streak was around the corner at any time. Even Greg from The Zone on 950 (no Bulls fan himself, to say the least) picked the Bulls to emerge and separate themselves from the mediocrity. But it flat out never got any better. Not even a little bit.

There were no offseason losses. Nobody got old. Nobody is past their prime. There were no key injuries (until later in the season with Gordon and Deng). Simply put, it boils down to this. The Bulls were good at basketball in 2006-07. Then they added some key pieces. Then the Bulls were bad at basketball in 2007-2008. It's as simple as that.

I almost equate it to the Colts or somebody for this upcoming year. They had a good year last year but lost in the playoffs. They're returning all their key pieces for 2008. What if they show up for this upcoming season and are just bad??? Not going to happen, but it's almost as inexplicable to that to me. (OK maybe an NFL team is a bad example because of the "parity" on which the NFL prides itself...and the playoff turnover in that league. And yeah, the Colts actually have won a championship recently...) But still...the Bulls were on the rise. All signs pointed to the best being yet to come.

People who blame John Paxson for this mess are absolute fools. Paxson did everything to make sure this roster was in sparkling condition for a run this year. His ONLY mistake was not coming down to actually coach the team after Scott Skiles was relieved of his duties on Christmas Eve. I still believe with all my heart that if Pax had taken over at that point, the Bulls would have been the five or six seed in the East.

Instead he inserted lame-duck interim coach Jim Boylan, and it spiraled from there.

I love Kirk Hinrich. But he was brutal this year. I was really hoping he could lead this franchise back to greatness. I wanted it to happen with this core. I love Deng and Duhon and Gordon, and Nocioni. But it didn't happen. The window has passed. It's over.

Please keep Hinrich. That's all I ask. Anything more than that would be greedy on my point at this point. But keep Kirk.

The Bulls have consistently been in the NBA lottery in the past few years. Partly because of picks they earned themselves, but more recently because of Paxson's GM wizardry in prying lottery picks from others.

So here we are...in the lottery again. And NBAdraft dot net has the Bulls taking Russell Westbrook. Really? Another guard? Let's see...you have Hinrich, Duhon, Gordon, Thabo Sefalosha, Larry Hughes, Shannon Brown, JamesOn Curry, and others. But then again, they're kind of deep at every position by this time. I guess I don't care what they do in the draft really. I just need it to get better. And fast.

But either way...for now I still trust Paxson, and will do so until I'm given a real reason why I shouldn't.