It is all of ambitious, audacious and bleakly illustrative of the season the Chicago Bulls are having.
The Boston Celtics, reported the Boston Herald on Thursday, made a play at the trade deadline for one of the NBA's best players, Jimmy Butler.
It had to have felt galling for the Bulls, at first. The Celtics, who backed into the play-offs with a losing record last season, inquiring after their best player. Chicago, who were the third-best team in the East last season. Who boast a former MVP among their ranks, Derrick Rose, a great still playing at a high level, Pau Gasol, and a roster broadly considered deep, talented and complementary.
Why would they, the Bulls, think of trading their budding superstar linchpin to them, the Celtics, who are a mishmash of reclamation projects, spare parts and young if talented uncertainties?
And then when the indignation passed, well, the Bulls brain trust probably had to stop and actually consider it.
“This is not a case where Chicago was looking to trade Jimmy Butler,” the Boston Herald quoted a source saying. “That would be crazy.”
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But, noted Herald reporter Steve Bulpett, "the Bulls are in a difficult position this season".
And therein lies the ugly truth for Chicago, one that surely appeared painfully and glaringly clear as Boston implicitly suggested it would make sense for them to part with their best player.
The Bulls are not contenders. The Celtics are.
Butler is not going to save Chicago. He could have gone a long way with Boston.
And that has to be a difficult and frankly stunning realisation to come to. The Bulls, by any passing glance, should be a formidable NBA team. Instead, as of Thursday, they are not even among the Eastern Conference’s play-off sides.
As if to underscore their dire position, the Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Rosenbloom summed things up on Thursday.
“They all look like they’re being forced to play, frankly. They don’t appear to want to play as a team. There’s no leadership. There’s no respect for the man who stands where the coach usually stands,” Rosenbloom wrote. “They’re better off trading one of your heroes.
“I don’t see this getting better quickly otherwise.”
What happened that the Bulls have fallen this far, this fast?
Even earlier this season they looked reliably on track to finish among at least the East’s top four or so.
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Now, they look exhausted. Not just tired on the court, or frustrated to the point of hopelessness, but exhausted of their once-bright potential.
They completed, incidentally enough, a six-game winning streak on January 7 for their best stretch this year, beating none other than the Celtics to improve to 22-12. They are 8-18 since.
Their defence has fallen apart. Since that win against the Celtics, they have actually scored (101.0 points per 100 possessions) at minimally better than the rate as before (100.9).
The problem is that as their win streak ended on January 7, they went from allowing an NBA fifth-best 98.7 points/100 to allowing an eighth-worst 107.4 points/100.
And Rose seems a problem. Since that early January start of the slide, when the former MVP is on the court, the Bulls are over nine points worse per 100 possessions.
Butler has mostly maintained his production. When he comes off the Bulls are about three points worse per 100 as when he is on.
All of those numbers are simply confirmation for a harrowing reality becoming more and more clear in Chicago.
These Bulls just look at their end. The Derrick Rose Bulls, or the Jimmy Butler Bulls, or the Derrick Rose-and-Jimmy Butler Bulls or the Jimmy Butler-and-Derrick Rose Bulls, can no longer keep up the pretence that they can reach a title-worthy level.
What has been a given for a long time – that if Rose just gets healthy, if Rose gets back to his old level, if Butler reaches another level, if they can just get a coach with the right touch for this squad, if this or that or the other then they will be right there in the championship mix – is just no longer tenable.
[ jraymond@thenational.ae ]
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