Bulls about to go where Cubs find themselves
Easy for me to say.
I can go ahead and tell the United States to destroy Iran, Jeff Samardzija to get a haircut, and Miley Cyrus to go stand in the corner.
They aren’t my decision, my hair or my daughter.
Likewise, none of those seats in the United Center are mine because I can’t afford Bulls season tickets.
So what do I have to lose by suggesting that the Bulls dump all their players, tank the rest of the season and embark on another never-ending rebuilding project in Chicago sports?
Nothing to lose really.
The tank-you-very-much concept makes sense now that Derrick Rose will miss the rest of this season while rehabbing a surgically repaired torn medial meniscus.
Except, somebody has to look out for the thousands of Bulls fans who will fund the reconstruction project. Those poor saps, uh, fans are the ones who likely are finding themselves between a rock (squandering the kids’ college fund) and a hard place (trusting the basketball acumen of Jerry Reinsdorf, John Paxson and Gar Forman).
Bulls fans might want to meet Cubs fans, though some need only look in the mirror to do so.
The Cubs are in the third year of promising that if fans are patient they will be rewarded with a World Series championship sometime in today’s newborn’s lifetime.
Never mind that Tom Ricketts is paying Theo Epstein millions of dollars to make that promise come true. What matters is that in the meantime Cubs season-ticket holders are paying thousands of dollars to watch horrible baseball.
Sure, fans have the option of giving up their seats. But what if Ricketts remodels Wrigley Field into a comfortable ballpark and Epstein fills it with championship players? Longtime season-ticket holders wouldn’t want to miss out on something like that after all these years, would they?
That’s the dilemma.
Many Chicagoans are proposing that the Bulls move pieces around like the Cubs have been doing.
Get something in trade for Luol Deng … amnesty Carlos Boozer … gut the rest of the roster … bring that serviceable European across the pond … turn that Charlotte lottery pick into another serviceable player … lose enough games to fall into one of the studs in the next draft … and, most of all, wait for Rose to return better than ever like he was supposed to from his previous knee injury.
That’s a Bulls fan’s dilemma, too.
Just about every inadequate NBA team is trying to tear it down now to build it back up later. Isn’t that what the Bulls were doing before they lucked into Rose in the draft lottery, then built a nice little roster around him and still haven’t won anything?
Slip into a fashionable tank top and there still isn’t any guarantee that Rose will be a superstar again, that his supporting cast won’t fall short again, and that the Bulls will be anything more than the top end of NBA mediocrity again.
If they want to try that, yeah, it’s easy enough for me to say, yeah, go ahead and blow up the whole thing and start over.
Whether the men and women paying for all those United Center seats will mind would be interesting to survey. Like Cubs fans, Bulls fans will have to decide whether to be held hostage by hope.
Theo Epstein has asked what the difference is, really, between the Cubs winning 73 games or 78 games in a season. One difference is that between 30,000 and 40,000 fans would leave the ballpark happier up to five more times.
That’s those fans’ problem, however.
I can’t afford Cubs or Bulls tickets anyway so — why not? — go ahead and blow the whole thing up.
Indeed, that is easy for me to say.