December 9, 2019: Not Last Place

It’s pretty crazy that an 8-17 record in the NBA is not last place; thank you Cavaliers. After watching the Bulls on Monday night, I sure felt like we should be in last place.

Did you catch the attendance on this evening? The announced attendance was 14,775 per KC Johnson; that’s about 2/3 full. It was the lowest attendance for a home game since 2004 per basketball reference per Daniel Greenberg. I saw the pictures; the place was fricking empty. That made me sad, then happy, then mad. It’s sad to see the UC empty during a Bulls game. There’s no way that in THIS city with the NBA franchise that was once the gold standard with 6 trophies in the 90s that we should be here. That’s when I got mad. But I passed over the happy… happy because maybe THIS will finally force a change. But who are we kidding here? Jerry Reinsdorf is busy with the White Sox offering players millions of dollars to play for a team that nobody wants to play with, while letting his son run the Bulls… or letting his son let GarPax do whatever the F they want and get away with it. Now I’m mad again. OK, let’s reign it in… if we go down that path, we may not return.

Let’s look at the team’s performance on this historic evening in the UC. It was nothing new losing to the Raptors; we’ve now lost 11 straight games to them. But the way we lost… geez, was I getting pissed. There was a stretch in the 2nd quarter where the Bulls refused to go to the basket and kept chucking up 3 pointers; it made me sick. 1-11 at one point I believe. If it ain’t working, you need to try something different. I don’t get why we keep wanting to shoot threes; is that the coaching? Is that the players just being lazy? Yet, even after all of that, we were still in the game.

I love Wendell Carter Jr; one of my favorites on this team. But for God’s sake, will someone tell him to look for his damn shot! Don’t just get the ball in the post and fire it back to the 3 point line where we suck anyways. Again, coaching should be on his ass about this; Stacey was. Then there’s the whole rotation of players. Boylen who apparently uses the “hot hand” approach… shit, it’s more like the “pick a hand” approach. It’s becoming quite clear that he has no clue; some have been saying this for a while now. But as I have objectively tried to look at this, trying to give Boylen every benefit of the doubt, I can’t help but come back to this: he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And since he doesn’t know what he’s doing, the players don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s pretty clear; just look at the first fricking possession of that game last night.

I’ve got so much more to say… specifically want to dive in on Zach Lavine. I want to blame him for his end of game actions, and heck, during the game actions, but for some reason I think the coaching isn’t doing what it needs to do to set him up to succeed. That’s a tough one. But I need to end this now… Next game, Atlanta Hawks at home on Wednesday night; I wonder what the attendance will be then. Go Bulls…