Lincicome: No use paying attention to these Ignor-a-Bulls
The obligation to notice the Bulls weighs lightly and gets no help from the Bulls themselves who offer no reason at all to be encouraged, unhappy or curious. They are the Ignor-a-Bulls, if you will, and if you won't, excuse the pun, it is more than they merit.
The Bulls are, according to various reliable reports, a team without an identity and they are sorry about that and hope to do better.
Taking as true the old saw that 30 days hath September and all the rest have basketball, it must be assumed that the Bulls have been on active duty since then, charging full price for tickets and keeping score.
Where to start? Let's check the standings, a fluid measurement at the best of times and a consistent embarrassment for the Bulls all the time.
The NBA insists on keeping standings during what is amusingly tolerated as "the season," some 82 games that determine which teams have not wasted their time, or ours, and which team gets to choose some kid from France in the draft.
The Bulls can certainly admit to the first and have no chance for the second, leaving the dilemma of trying to win enough games to play one more or to lose enough to make sure they can maybe get a kid from Alabama.
The most honorable goal for the Bulls now is to become an afterthought; this is a kinder designation than "chump change" but an accomplishment only possible in the NBA. There is a consolation prize for losers called the "play-in" tournament where four of the un-worst teams are allowed to play to get into the playoffs.
The play-in playoff may seem redundant and manipulative, but it fools even those who take part. Example: the newest Bull, a self-anointed bull spitter name Patrick Beverley, was fined $30,000 for showing his joy ("egregious use of profanity," according to the NBA) in winning one of those while in Minnesota, one of his career rest stops that stretch from Aurora to Arkansas to Ukraine to Greece to Russia to Houston to LA to Minnesota to LA and now back home, a regular Joni Mitchell lyric.
Anyone capable of egregious use of anything has to be welcome on the Bulls, no matter how late or how futile.
Whereas the wise among us might suggest that the regular season is itself a play-in tournament we would have to be paying attention other than on Christmas Day and during the All-Star puff and preen.
Handily the NBA piles everything into neat piles at the end, leaving the only question to be asked, "Where is Kevin Durant playing this month?"
But, back to the Bulls. They are still obliged to finish the season one way or the other, reserving standing headlines like "Bulls Shut Down Ball for Season," an unintentional double entendre, as opposed to a triple double entendre.
The Bulls have the essential trio that champions need, a standard established by LeBron James who put together in Miami himself, Dwane Wade and Chris Bosh and then later as himself, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love in Cleveland and then himself and …well, let's face it, the only way a Big Three works if one of three is James.
There have been other Big Threes, notably on the Bulls with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman and there was Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish and on and on. The point is that none of the Big Three on these Bulls is that big at all.
Key is DeMar DeRozan, earnest and ordinary, and Nikola Vucevic, dependable and diacritical and the great hope and greatest disappointment, the most overpaid underachiever in the NBA, Zach LaVine, the three of them working together like a glove without a hand.
At times like these, with unmet goals and vague excuses, the coach would likely be sending out his resume. But Billy Donovan is solidly secure as the man who blows the whistle as well as the architect of it all, Arturas Karnisovas, the executive vice president of sitting on his hands.
Ambitious teams rebuild. The Bulls recess. Draft, free agency, trades, all ahead, all possible and even likely. We'll be watching. Or not.