Bernstein: Bulls Confront Ugly Truth At Trade Deadline
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) Trying to paint NBA trade-deadline scenarios for the Bulls is no fun. Trust me.
Players and draft picks can change hands across the league up until 2 p.m. CST on Thursday, and there are few avenues that appear available for this battered and beleaguered team to alter its proximity to a title. This is what the end of something looks like, and the beginning of the next thing has yet to take shape.
We're a long way from that June press conference to introduce Fred Hoiberg as coach, when he said, "I absolutely love this roster. I'm here to do everything I can to support them, work with them and hopefully bring this group to where we're competing for a world championship."
This roster blows, and the Bulls are competing for nothing at 27-25 while in a tailspin that's seen them lose 13 of 18 games. If Hoiberg is ever leading a champion, it's a different group, not this one.
Complicating all of it too is a decline in the value of their own assets that makes any trade tough to arrange, with the Bulls now having so little to offer. It's perhaps the biggest disappointment of the start of the Hoiberg era – even considering the injuries and recent losing – that their young players aren't getting better. Nikola Mirotic has gone from exciting prospect to benched at two separate positions to out indefinitely after a routine surgery resulted in internal bleeding. Doug McDermott has blossomed into one of the least efficient players in the league, and Tony Snell has turned physical mistakes and lack of court-awareness into a kind of performance art.
That's three first-round picks that are now worth less than before, just part of this Bulls stagflation.
Derrick Rose being what's left of him and Jimmy Butler being a bad fit with Hoiberg are the others.
There's one more season of Rose after this, though the possibility of a trade for Dwight Howard is interesting, in that a flip of the twin Adidas albatrosses could allow the Bulls to get out from under that dead money a year earlier. Such cap concerns mattered more before the new TV deal had everyone swimming in money, however.
Any bold stroke would have to involve Butler, because he's the only thing perceived valuable enough elsewhere to merit any material return. And if Bulls management assesses him honestly, they may see the right time to be active in gauging the current market.
Butler clearly doesn't like playing for Hoiberg, appearing to have only minimal respect for him, tactically and otherwise. Butler's season so far has seen him declare himself team leader, make a public demand that Hoiberg "coach harder," then reject Hoiberg's effort to install his offense by vetoing it for isolations instead of ball movement. Butler trashed his coach further at the All-Star festivities last week by saying, "I think we rely too much on offense. We lose a lot of games when we try to outscore people." Asked about the player/coach relationship, Butler said, "I can be better, he can be better."
Well OK, then.
Neither Hoiberg nor Butler is going to change who he is, and both are in the first season of five-year deals. Hoiberg's unabashedly an offensive-minded strategist, and his up-tempo system and laid-back personality were two key reasons he got the job. He's going to implement his offense, regardless of current kicking and screaming.
Butler, meanwhile, is a throwback shooting guard whose game is better suited to the early '90s than what is currently in style around the league that the Bulls want to emulate. He's a call-a-play, clear-a-side, attack-your-guy player. It makes it even more untenable when he has crowned himself king and has chosen to lead by pining publicly for his former coach in thinly veiled fashion. And he's hurt, too, out until at least early March with a left knee strain.
I said this wasn't fun.
Pau Gasol can go, because he's soon going anyway. He might not net much, but something is better than nothing and it could get the Bulls out of the luxury tax. Taj Gibson might find a taker, too, but that's all small stuff.
The Bulls are looking at fundamental problems that require tough questions, brutally honest answers and the courage to act on them as needed. It all got here awfully fast, and finding a realistic path back from the wilderness must have already begun.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. You can follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.
