Chicago Bulls Put Off Rebuild for Another Year, and That's Confusing
CHICAGO — Gar Forman has interesting definitions of the words “younger” and “more athletic.”
Those were buzzwords the Chicago Bulls general manager returned to on Thursday afternoon when he introduced the team’s newest acquisition, 30-year-old point guard Rajon Rondo. It came a day after the Bulls reportedly agreed to a two-year, $47.5 million deal with 34-year-old Dwyane Wade, per Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical, although Forman could not yet speak on that move as it was not yet official.
But as blatantly false as that description is for the new-look Bulls, and as jarring as it was to watch Forman say with a straight face that he believed his new roster was, in fact, younger and more athletic, some clarity of vision started to emerge Thursday.
The Bulls’ plan? Keep their long-term flexibility and cap space and stay relevant in the meantime rather than bottoming out.
It just so happens that their definition of “staying relevant” is assembling a backcourt that’s a lock to make a deep run in the 2011 Eastern Conference playoffs.
“We weren’t going to look at a total rebuild,” Forman said. “We still want to try to put a competitive team and as good a team as we can on the floor. With that said, we knew we were going to make changes to this roster. We knew we wanted to get younger and continue to develop our young guys. And we knew we wanted to keep flexibility into the future.
“For me, that’s what’s so encouraging. We really didn’t give up any of those type of assets, young assets, whether it’s picks or players and we still kept a good level of flexibility into the future. And in doing so, we feel we’ve added some really talented players to our team that we feel can help us continue to get better and to improve.”
Did they add talented players? Absolutely. But the fit is painfully awkward, both among the on-court personnel and between players and coach.
Fred Hoiberg is a laid-back, drama-free coach who preaches pace and ball movement, and the front office has given him a collection of ball-dominant guards who aren’t great outside shooters and have a combination of personalities that could be combustible if not managed perfectly.
It was already hard enough to get Jimmy Butler and Derrick Rose in sync last year, and Rose’s personality is as go-along/get-along as they come. Trading Rose in late June and reportedly rebuffing offers for Butler on draft night, per Shams Charania of The Vertical, signified a clear decision to remake the latter as the Bulls’ focal point and centerpiece.
Adding Rondo and Wade to the mix to replace Rose is at best confusing and shortsighted, a potential chemistry disaster at worst.
Rondo is coming off a forgettable run that included a high-profile falling out with Rick Carlisle while in Dallas during 2015, and a 2015-16 Sacramento Kings performance that featured solid box-score numbers (a league-leading 11.7 assists per game) but didn't contribute to much team success (a 33-49 record and another missed playoff berth).
Wade was relatively healthy last season—he played 74 games, his most since the 2010-11 season—and he still commands a lot of touches. Last season, he posted a whopping usage rate of 31.6 percent, per Basketball-Reference.com, and helped lead the Heat to a 48-34 record and a first-round playoff series win. But he also saw his effective shooting percentage dip yet again.
On Thursday, Rondo called himself, Wade and Butler “three alphas,” which is a hashtag waiting to happen. He’s preaching sacrifice and calling back to lessons he learned playing with Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce of the Big Three-era Boston Celtics in the late 2000s.
But those egos may prove too hard to put aside.
Butler finally gets a team to himself with Rose out of the picture, and now he has to share it with two more All-Stars who are past their physical primes. Rondo is on essentially a one-year deal (BasketballInsiders.com’s Eric Pincus reported that just $3 million of his 2017-18 salary is guaranteed), but he's still trying to prove he’s worth a longer commitment. He received limited interest on the free-agent market the last two summers.
And Wade didn’t leave Miami, where he’s as much of an institution as Dirk Nowitzki is in Dallas, to play second or third fiddle. Not for the money they’re paying him, anyway.
The man who will be in charge of walking this tightrope of superstar egos is Hoiberg, who is a respected basketball intellectual but has neither the clout nor the demeanor to stand up to any of these big names, with four NBA championships and years of playoff success between them.
“He’s not an egotistical coach,” Rondo said of Hoiberg on Thursday. “He’s not a dominant coach. He likes for his guys to have input. When he asks my input, I’ll obviously share. We’ll go in his office and watch some film and figure out what’s best for the team.”
There will certainly be input from this set of players, and there will be a lot of it.
Sometimes they will disagree, and even if everyone’s on the same page, the personnel is not well-suited to the style Hoiberg wants to play. The Bulls still only have a couple of players who can shoot, and none of them are the ones who will be gobbling up the lion’s share of the shots.
There are a handful of promising young players on this roster—Doug McDermott, Nikola Mirotic, Bobby Portis, Cristiano Felicio, Jerian Grant and this year’s No. 14 overall pick, Denzel Valentine. Somewhere in there, there’s a young nucleus worth building around Butler.
But to let that group breathe and develop would require taking several steps back and accepting a few years of picking in the lottery. In bringing aboard Rondo and Wade, the Bulls’ front office has demonstrated it doesn’t have the stomach for that kind of rebuild.
The 2016-17 Bulls will be more compelling than last year’s lethargic 42-win group, and they'll certainly be more entertaining. How much better they’ll be is another matter entirely.
Sean Highkin covers the Chicago Bulls for Bleacher Report and co-hosts the Locked On Bulls podcast. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
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