December 12, 2019: Bad Beats Bad

Hey hey, the Bulls won a game. They beat the hapless Atlanta Hawks. But that’s who they beat… bad teams. Bad beats bad is the name of the game. All of the Bulls victories have come against teams currently with losing records. As a matter of fact, the combined record of the teams they have beat is 51-98. But hey, we won, so who’s complaining?

Surely, I’m not going to complain about the Bulls actually winning a game; sorry if it came off that way. A win is better than a loss any day of the week; don’t care who we play. Would it be nice to beat a good team? Sure. The Bulls will host the 11-16 Hornets on Friday night at the UC. We’re going to have to wait until Saturday when we host the 19-7 Clippers to accomplish that season first.

Zach Lavine… let’s talk about him a bit. He had an awesome game on Wednesday night at the UC. 35 points on 12-16 shooting including a perfect 7-7 from 3 point land. There have been 5 other games this season where he has shot better than 500 from the field; the Bulls have won 4 of those 5 games. Is it as simple as shot selection? I remember hearing some stat last year, which I’m pretty sure is similar this year, where he takes the shots with the highest level of difficulty; I can see that with the naked eye. Those need to stop. Sure, will there be instances where we will need him to make an extremely difficult shot? Yes. Do we need him to try these heroic shots in the middle of a game? No.

One of the best things about Zach is that at times, he seems like he can get to the bucket at will. Love it. Love to see that at the end of games too unless one of your teammates is standing wide open like Gafford at the end of the Raptors game. Zach ended up taking a very difficult shot instead, and missed it. Another thing that I like about Zach is that he wants to be THE guy; you want players like that. You don’t want guys afraid of the moment; Zach is certainly not scared. However, his decision making has been questionable; that’s been talked about a lot. Fade away threes vs driving to the basket; head down driving to the rim vs looking to see if a teammate becomes open on a drive. Asking for too much? How is he being coached in these situations?

I’ve been back and forth about Zach his entire Bulls tenure. When I say back and forth, not that I don’t like him, but do I believe he can be THE guy? As I thought I would give Boylen a full year before I made a decision on his ability, I thought giving Zach the entire year to either prove or disprove this would be fair. I’m already heavily leaning a bad way on Boylen; I’m leaning that same way regarding Zach being THE guy. I think he’d be a great #2; is that bad to say? Well, when we traded away our #1 to get him plus some, we took an initial step back, with the hope that Zach and/or Lauri could blossom into those guys. Two years later we still don’t have anybody at Jimmy Butler’s level; that’s a fact. Will the boys still be able to get there? I’m not going to rule that out, but nothing I’ve seen this year so far has told me I should believe that. Where does that leave us?

That leaves us in the middle of another crap year with a questionable (at-best) coach with our top young guys not being able to take their game to the next level. Where do we go from here? Well, if these are two separate unrelated developments, then we stay in NBA hell for the foreseeable future. If you believe the two are related, then it seems to be an easy choice to get these guys and team jump started in the right direction, to a place where I’d thought they’d be this year. Do we need more patience? GarPax, what you say? Go Bulls!