The Expend-a-Bulls
Chicago may have hit upon a new formula for NBA success with players discarded by other teams
Doc Rivers put NBA life in perspective before a game last month against the Chicago Bulls.
“There are the 1 percenters and the 99 percenters,” the Philadelphia 76ers coach and Proviso East legend said. “The problem is all the 99 percenters want to be 1 percenters, and a lot of them waste their career chasing that instead of having a hell of a career being that 99%.”
Rivers was referring to Bulls center Tony Bradley, one of his former 76ers players, who is trying to find a niche in a backup role.
But Rivers might as well have been speaking of the Bulls in general. This is a team of 99 percenters, players who know their roles and take pride in each other’s success.
“The whole team plays for one another,” guard Lonzo Ball said after Monday’s blowout of the Los Angeles Lakers. “Even out there playing small ball, we’ve got guys 6-7, 6-8 playing center. I’m playing a little power forward (at 6-foot-6). AC (Alex Caruso) is playing power forward (at 6-5).
“It’s just the will and the fight that we have as a collective unit. We all have the common goal to win the game. When you put your ego aside and high-character guys step up, that’s what happens.”
DeMar DeRozan, who frequently takes over games late in Jordanesque fashion, certainly qualifies as a 1 percenter in terms of talent. So does Zach LaVine, an
Olympic gold medalist and All-Star looking for his first taste of the playoffs. Ball, only 24, could be on his way as well.
But when you watch the way they play, hear the way they talk about each other and see how much enjoyment they get out of sharing both the ball and the accolades, you can only wonder whether the Bulls’ success will render obsolete the recent NBA trend toward building a super team.
It’s early, of course, and there are a lot of games left. The Bulls are not getting any taller, barring a trade, and they miss their big guy, Nikola Vučević, who is absent for the current five-game trip after a positive COVID-19 test but still is communicating from Chicago on group chats.
You can probably add a few more caveats while trying to dismiss their 10-4 record as an example of NBA parity run amok. The Bulls and Washington Wizards are sizzling, while the Lakers and Milwaukee Bucks are treading water. It makes sense. Go ahead and debate it.
Meanwhile, the rest of us — the ones who remember an empty United Center on a cold January night and a mind-numbing, last-second loss to the Portland Trail Blazers — will just enjoy the ride.
Three reporters were on hand that night when Damian Lillard hit a stepback, buzzer-beating 3-pointer — his second 3 in the last eight seconds — to give the Blazers a stunning 123-122 win.
“You should be upset,” LaVine said afterward. “Everybody shows human nature. You’ve just got to rewire your brain to get ready for the next one. But, yeah, it hurts being on the side of a loss like that where you think you have the game wrapped up and you fought back and put yourself in position to win.”
Yes, that was in 2021, though it seems like a completely different era.
The Bulls corrected course and ditched the rebuild. Now hardcore skeptics have suddenly turned into rim-protecting romantics.
The current Bulls players and coach Billy Donovan have one thing in common: They all were discarded by other teams for one reason or another.
LaVine and Ball were dealt from the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lakers, respectively, before they had a chance to fully blossom.
Management in both cases decided to go for broke by acquiring a superstar — Jimmy Butler by the Wolves and Anthony Davis by the Lakers — and LaVine and Ball were deemed expendable.
DeRozan helped the Toronto Raptors become a national obsession during his years up north, only to be dealt to the San Antonio Spurs in July 2018 in the Kawhi Leonard trade. Vučević toiled in relative obscurity in Orlando before being sent to a then-rebuilding Bulls team in March for a less expensive player, Wendell Carter Jr., with untapped potential.
Caruso became a cult hero in L.A., was BFFs with LeBron James and helped the Lakers win a ring in 2020. Yet they never considered re-signing him. On Monday night in his homecoming game, the Lakers feted Caruso’s career as if he were Magic Johnson.
Conducting this ragtag symphony is Donovan, whom the Oklahoma City Thunder let go in 2020 after their fourth straight first-round exit — a streak preceded by the exit of all-time great Kevin Durant after the 2015-16 season.
Whether rejected or just neglected, they all share the feeling of being unwanted.
Because of COVID-19 protocols that ban media from NBA locker rooms, reporters get only a few minutes of face time each week with the key players, so it’s hard to get a glimpse of the atmosphere inside the Bulls lair or to compare it with how it has been in the past.
Bulls fans and an organization coming out of hibernation and in prime position to take over the town for the foreseeable future. But it’s impossible not to notice that the players all enjoy each other’s company, which means Artūras Karnišovas did a fine job vetting the newcomers’ egos to see if they could fit together.
That made Monday’s win over the Lakers, who feature supersized egos from one end of the bench to the other, so fascinating to watch. Someone should write a college thesis on this game, which began with a stupendous, Vegas-like show during the Lakers’ pregame introductions and ended with Lakers fans casually posing for selfies on the floor after a brutal loss.
Then Ball and DeRozan complimented all of their teammates in separate postgame interviews. This selflessness isn’t by accident. Karnišovas obviously looked at more than box scores and analytics when he overhauled the roster.
He also seemingly found the perfect coach in Donovan, who constantly experiments with different rotations after taking four starters out, trying to make up for the Bulls’ lack of size by playing guys at unaccustomed positions. Somehow, it has worked.
Some coaches like to hear themselves talk, as we learned when former Bulls coach Jim Boylen kept calling timeouts at the end of double-digit losses to make it look like he was in “teaching” mode. There’s no such pretense with Donovan.
He sometimes talks in stream-of-consciousness fashion with the media, but he at least makes it a point to have a point. And he’s not too big to poke fun at himself. When Bulls.com writer
Sam Smith jokingly asked Donovan if he was ever part of a three-headed monster during his playing career, Donovan recalled it might have happened back on the playgrounds in New York — adding there are no records, fortunately, to fact-check.
Donovan and the Bulls arrived in Portland early Tuesday morning after the win in Los Angeles, and they’ll be back at work Wednesday night at the Moda Center, facing Lillard and Co. once again.
But this time the Bulls have rewired our brains in the best way imaginable, and there’s no turning back now.