Chicago Blues: Oh, How the Bulls Have Fallen

NBA All-Star Weekend is fast approaching, and Chicago Bulls fans have one question on their minds:

What the heck happened?

I look at the team’s 20-30 record and realize that they were supposed to have that many losses by the end of the regular season, not in mid-February. 

They were supposed to contend for the Eastern Conference title and maybe more.

If you told someone the Bulls are only a game-and-a-half out of the final playoff spot in the East, they probably wouldn’t believe it. That says something about the Eastern Conference, but that’s another story.

The story here is how quickly this Bulls team has fallen from grace. After sweeping the defending champion Miami Heat in last year’s playoffs and then taking the Detroit Pistons to six games in the following round, the stakes were raised for the next season.  Adding a low-post scorer and a good draft showing would make them serious contenders.

The end result in the draft was the often controversial Joakim Noah and the vastly underplayed Aaron Gray. Their new low-post scorer turned out to be none other than Joe Smith, whom Bulls fans have to admit has put up more points than P.J. Brown did last year and also has a better shooting range.

Sure, GM John Paxson would have loved to have Kobe Bryant or Pau Gasol on his team, but he refused to part with any of the core players on his current roster. After all, this was the year Luol Deng was supposed to become the Bulls’ first All-Star since MJ. Instead, Deng has been nursing left Achilles’ tendinitis for the past month and probably wasn’t going to make the All-Star roster anyway.

End result?  Bryant and Gasol are now teammates on a Lakers team that is now in serious contention to win the Western Conference.

From the beginning of the season, it was apparent that Ben Wallace’s years of at least 900 rebounds per year are over. Let’s face it: The primary reason Wallace became a Bull is not working this year. 

Before you cry about the bloated contract he received in the summer of 2006, though, keep in mind he was coming off his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award in five years, not to mention his fifth straight appearance on the All-Defensive First Team.

Plus, did anyone want to see Mike Sweetney crashing the boards anymore?

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but no one thought he would decline this much this quickly. The Bulls are now stuck with him for another couple of years and must pay him money that is no longer on par with his skills.

And don’t even start blaming injuries to players like Ben Gordon and Kirk Hinrich for this season’s downward spiral. This team was underachieving all-around well before that, and injuries to the core players were nothing more than salt in an open wound.

Perhaps replacing head coach Scott Skiles with Jim Boylan would change things? 

Not a chance. The story was still the same: The Bulls were only playing at the level of their opponents with the younger guys barely getting minutes.

Unless this team suddenly gets hot or wins enough games to barely make the postseason, this year will go down as the most disappointing in recent memory. Yes, even more so than the rebuilding years. As long as the Bulls remain in contention, though, they should keep trying to win (if that’s what they’re really doing).

I’ve never been a fan of losing games on purpose to achieve a better chance of a high draft pick.

The first half closes out with home games against New Orleans and Miami and a road game in New Jersey, where the Bulls never do well. That’s likely a 1-2 finish right there.

Should we believe they can salvage this season yet? 

Stranger things have happened.