Baffoe: Bulls' Nikola Mirotic Is Randomness At Its Best
By Tim Baffoe-
(CBS) A really random retweet popped up in my news feed Monday night.
If we want to really pick nits, Mirotic wasn't drafted by the Bulls. The Houston Rockets selected him with the 23rd overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft the day after the above tweet was made, and they then traded Mirotic's rights to the Minnesota Timberwolves, who later shipped those rights to the Bulls the same night.
But let's not be that nitpicky. For every hundred (or thousand) times you and I are wrong, we fall backward into a correct guess once. It's fun and quirky to see random predictions come to fruition, even when made by self-deprecating folk.
At the time the @AC_Bravos of the world were few and far between. Mirotic's name was known in hoops circles, but he was considered a wild card of a prospect -- immensely talented, playing great against weaker European competition, under contract overseas, questionable as to how his game would work in the NBA, blah blah blah. Still, he wasn't a terrible flyer for the Bulls to take coming off a 62-win season. Even more random were the dominoes that facilitated acquiring Mirotic. Want some random bittersweetness? If the Bulls didn't acquire Carlos Boozer, they never get Mirotic, as K.C. Johnson explained back in January.
That year's draft concluded with the two newest names under Bulls control being "Nee-COLA … NICK-uh-luh? MEER-oh-tick… My-ROH-tich?" and a try-hard Blind Side story named Jimmy Butler. So, basically a feeling of randomness.
Hopefully Butler would contribute positively, and hopefully Nee-co-LAH Muh-ROTE-itch would decide to come over here to the States someday and wouldn't be Dalibor Bagaric. The Bulls already had the league MVP who could do no wrong and a center who played like his hair was on fire. They were in a good place regardless of these randoms they just got.
It's pretty nice when randomness plays out in your favor, though, right? Credit to the Bulls front office for the bang-up scouting and assessing job — work that minimizes randomness rather than favoring it. But for most followers of the Bulls, the emergence of Mirotic on top of Butler etching his name into tar conversations has to be an admitted pleasant surprise more than fulfillment of some expectation.
Butler's play prior to this season already had established him locally as a trusted player who along with a healthy Derrick Rose and healthy Joakim Noah created a formidable opponent for anyone vying for the Eastern Conference title. Things fall apart, though — randomness isn't always positive. The Rose soap opera has taken another unfortunate turn, Noah is on a minutes restriction in an attempt to stop coach Tom Thibodeau from turning him into Jell-O with a ponytail and Butler returned Monday night from an 11-game injury absence.
All three of those guys presumably (though with this team it might not be smart to presume anything) will be fully functional for the postseason, but weeks ago that knowledge wasn't all that comforting. Bad luck had taken the Bulls from Eastern Conference favorite to assumed also-ran.
Then Mirotic randomly emerged from his bashful, tentative rookie cocoon as some kind of Mothra and destroyed everything in his path.
On Monday night against the Charlotte Hornets, Mirotic scored 28 points, one off his career-high. He also may be wanted for the manslaughter of Jason Maxiell.
More importantly, the confident, deadly Mirotic has forced people to reconsider the Bulls going into the playoffs. He's a game-changer, both on the court and in the basketball conversations.
"If Mirotic continues to be a go-to scorer/creator and step up down the stretch?" wrote Cody Westerlund after Monday's game. "A trip to the NBA Finals is within the Bulls' grasp.
"Think about that for a second. In a season in which Derrick Rose has shown flashes of brilliance and also undergone a third knee surgery and in a year in which the on-court play has often been overshadowed by the icy relationship between the front office and coach Tom Thibodeau, there's a more compelling topic right now."
Mirotic has the most fourth-quarter points in games since the All-Star Break in the entire NBA. He's averaging 21.0 points per game in March. He has become this random clutch go-to guy while coming off the bench for a team that will sport two All-Stars in its postseason starting lineup. And he's even coming around on defense a bit.
All of a sudden, a Bulls story that went from utmost promise at season's start to absurd tragicomedy has been reborn this spring into something glass half-full. And it's because of that wild card residually acquired because of Carlos freaking Boozer of all glass half-empty representations of the Bulls.
It looks like randomness at its best.
Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe.
