The 2007 All-Star-less Chicago Bulls

As we near the greatest day in the history of earth, better known as St. Patrick’s Day, we all need to take a step back and thank the good Lord for all the blessings in our lives. One blessing you should be especially thankful for is staff writer/dog park navigator Jim Cook and his look at the 11 years in-between Chicago Bulls All-Stars. Okay, enough with the sappy-sappy and on to Jim’s musings…oh yea, in case you missed any of the first eight parts they are below.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII

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It’s been about a week since I’ve given you all a piece of my mind and a recap of the Chicago Bulls during their All-Star drought.  And as a reward for your patience, I will provide you with a story and a recap of the most successful Chicago Bulls season in our 38 part series.  As with all these diatribes (not sure if that’s the right use but it’s a cool sounding word), make sure you set aside a couple of minutes to read what I’m about to write because there will be a quiz at the end of today’s lesson.

Let’s start with the story.  Although I have a great story about Toni Kukoc, whom you may remember from part 1, 2, or 3 (if Lil’ Roman is smart, he’ll link put the links where the 1, 2, and 3 are), this story has to do with an experience that many sports fans probably have thought “that would be cool to do”.  On Sunday, I was blessed with 300 level tickets from one of my cousin’s good friends, Mike Stack, for the Blackhawks-Red Wings game.  You may have seen it, it was on TV.  You may have seen me, they show good looking people on TV.  While walking out the door, I quickly caught myself and ran back into my room to grab a hat…just in case.  (If you don’t know where this story is going, keep going.  Otherwise you can skip to the Bulls stuff you also don’t like)  Anyways, we’re at the game, sitting in our 300 level seats, having a good time and our good friend Andrew Ladd netted himself the first goal of the game. 

After my second Bud Select of the late morning, I told my cousin “If Ladd scores twice more, I’m throwing this hat.  It’s the only reason I brought a hat.”  He laughs, I don’t.  We debate where the hat would actually land.  I saw right on the back of the head of the Indian at Center Ice.  My cousin doesn’t even think it makes it out of the third row.  I tell him I’m gonna throw him on the back of the Indian head and that ends the conversation for the time being.  Anyways, Mr. Ladd scores himself another goal early in the third period and I’m starting to think that it’s going to happen.  I’m going to see a hat trick and I’ll be able to throw my hat on the ice. 

Now, I become REALLY obnoxious, even though the guys next to me are enjoying my combination of enthusiasm and stale booze.  Basically anytime Ladd touched the puck or looked at the puck or was in the stadium, I would encourage him to shoot the puck.  I tried my best to make sure he heard me.  Finally, he got the hint and scored his third goal to cap off the hat trick.  Now it’s time for me to put up after I had been begging for it for all game long.  Much more thought had been put into how I could yell louder for Ladd to get a hat trick than what I’d do if he actually did score.  So I took off my hat and eyed up that Indian head.  Now here’s the part you hockey fans will want to pay attention to:

I threw the hat like you would a frisbee.  It spun gloriously as the “da-da-da-da-da” song plays in the background.  The trajectory is looking really good.  And then it just hung in the air.  Slowly but surely it floats below our vantage point undoubtedly in the very last row of the second deck at best.  Last I saw, it was not making it to the Indian head.  I immediately regretted not practicing before.  My cousin was being a jerk off and wouldn’t let me try again with his White Sox hat so I was left with the slow float of my Miami Redhawks hat knowing it didn’t make it to the ice to celebrate.  My recommendation for the future, throw it like you’re pulling down a window shade.  And if that doesn’t work, you’re on your own.  Odds are you won’t ever see a live hat trick anyways so these past 24 minutes have been a waste of time for me writing and 30 seconds of you reading.

So now that we’re done with the foreplay, let’s get into this 2006-2007 Chicago Bulls season.  Clearly the most successful squad of the era.  A much tougher squad than what we typically were treated to, on both ends of the floor.  Honestly, I felt like this season had a ton of sloppy games in it, and winning ugly was an identity of this Bulls squad.  That can be attributed to the signing of the sloppy, ugly Ben Wallace.  Being able to sign one of the most valuable defender and rebounder in the league was a huge boost, not to mention that it put a major dent in his previous team’s armor, the Detroit Pistons.  De-troit Sucks.  All it cost to bring Big Ben to town was $60 mil over 4 years for a 32 year old that could only do one thing very well (rebound) and another pretty good (defense).  I’m not going to lie, I was pretty pumped at the time.  Although the Bulls didn’t really need another big man who could rebound and miss shots by the hoop and airball free throws, I did think it was good that they were able to poach away a main cog of the Pistons sorta dynasty.  Little did I know how disappointing Big Ben would actually play.  But of course, hindsight is 50/50.  With the signing of Wallace, it was necessary to get rid of the younger, cheaper version of Wallace the Bulls currently had in Tyson Chandler.  Remember when he was traded for Elton Brand a while back?  When we decided to cash in on our Chandler stock, all it was worth was PJ Brown and JR Smith.  So basically he was worth a lot of initials.  The Bulls then decided they didn’t want a guard who could score quickly and make big shots (that’ll come back to haunt them in future episodes that you won’t read) and flip JR for Howard Eisly, and two 2nd round picks.  Those picks turned out to be Aaron Gray and JamesOn Curry.  More on them later.  But if we track what we got for Elton Brand, an All-Star, double-double machine, and low post scorer that the team desperately looked for  years, we see it was PJ Brown, Howard Eisly, Aaron Gray, and JamesOn Curry.  We talked about ROI earlier and we can safely conclude that the Bulls received an AWFUL ROI on the first pick in the ’99 draft.  Don’t have to look far to see why this team was so bad for so long.  Anyways, that was a whole lot of word diarrhea for me basically saying this…In: Wallace and Brown, Out: Chandler.  Yeah, there were some spare pieces that came and went but I’ve already blabbed on enough and none of them really meant a difference anyways.  Well, they signed Adrian Griffin again.  I’d take a cup of Perdue pee to figure out why.  God damn somebody really liked that guy or something.  Whatever, let’s move on.

The Bulls also acquired this guy: http://search.espn.go.com/martynas-andriuskevicius/

 As for the draft, basically the same shit as in free agency.  A whole lot of hope, not a whole lot of output.  This season or in the long term.  Because of the Eddy Curry robbery of the Knicks, the Bulls owned what turned out to be the second overall pick in the draft.  John Paxson, taking this stroke of great luck and prime opportunity to start building a dynasty decided to take a complete project in the form of Tyrus Thomas.  Well, let me step back and say the Bulls took LaMarcus Aldridge, the back to the basket big man they have been searching for since Brand (minus that one contract year from jizz-towel Curry).  Aldridge, although lean, was a strong scorer at Texas and maybe might have made a little bit of sense to get on the team to compliment the defense and rebounding of every single big man the Bulls had on the roster so far.  But what the fuck do I know?  Anyways, Johnny P flipped Aldridge for the raw Thomas and Viktor Khryapa.  His name is pronounced “Crap-ah”.  He played like “Crap-ah”.  Someone needed to tell Pax that it’s ok if the Bulls don’t get the absolute worst player in every trade.  Back to Thomas.  Tyrus was coming off an exceptionally exciting freshman season where he (and Big Baby Davis when he was really fat) LSU to the Final Four.  Thomas put up great performances in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight, culminating in a 9 point, 13 rebound, 5 block effort against Duke.  And then in their Elite Eight game against Texas, he blew up going for 21, 13, and 5.  Although it was questionable if he would ever be able to develop an offensive arsenal, it was widely acknowledged that he would be able to contribute rebounding and defense quickly.  Cause we needed more of that from our front court (shaking my head),  The kid had athleticism out of control and a whole bunch of raw talent.  The only problem was that he was a 19 year old kid, picking up basketball as a junior in high school, he didn’t really have too much experience.  His play as a rookie reminded me of me in the bedroom: excited, caught out of position frequently, and being told to get out after about 2 minutes.  But after a freshman year of 12 and 9, I can understand why the Bulls might have been so attracted to his talent.

 

 

With their original first round pick, the Bulls did some more wheeling and dealing because Pax likes to make dumb trades that piss me off.  They took their 13th overall selection and traded it to the Philly 76ers for their 16th overall, a second round pick, and cash.  I’m not going to break this down because I’ve already wrote too much shit about this season so I’ll skip to the money shot: the Bulls selected a French guy named Thabo Sefolosha.  According to Wikipedia, he’s a Swiss guy.  Wherever he’s from, they shouldn’t be throwing him a parade anytime soon.  The scouts that wasted their time watching him play against people wearing dresses determined that he also was a solid defender but without any assurance of developing a strong offensive game.  What the fuck?  How many more times are they going to draft like that?  Could this be me hinting at what they’re going to do in next year’s draft?  (nodding my head)  Thabo seemed like a nice guy but he never really found a spot in the rotation.  And with General Skiles not being too friendly with rookies, Thabo and Tyrus both found themselves on the very short end of the playing time see-saw.  The Bulls second round pick got traded around so I’m not going to waste your time tracking it like Jack Bauer so I’m just going to say in that slot, the Utah Jazz took Dee Brown, 1991 NBA Dunk Champion and 2005 First Team All-American.  That doesn’t sound right…

Coach

General Skiles was back in control of this team for his third term and change.  I don’t feel like looking up documentation or articles supporting my claim, but it was widely considered that the Bulls were one of the most disciplined and well-coached teams in all of basketball.  High marks for Scotty.  Does anyone notice that he’s currently doing the same thing with the Bucks that he once did with the Bulls?  Taking a young team, grooming them, getting them to overachieve by defense…and that segues into their #6 defensive ranking (out of 30) and a strong 13 rank in points per game.  Better than the year before, eh?

Record

49-33.  Very respectable.  Good for the 5 seed in the Eastern Conference.  Especially not bad considering both the Pistons and Cavs had real strong seasons, which bumped the Bulls down the seeding ladder.  This record is even more respectable considering the Bulls started out in the shitter again.  Why they’d start the season 3-9 is beyond me, but they did and then only lost 24 games the rest of the way.  Not bad.  Plus they led the whole fucking league in attendance.  People were really excited to see Viktor Crap-a suite up.  He reminds me of Vikidis from Semi-Pro. 

 

Longest win streak

7, which obviously came after the preformentioned 3-9 start.  Is preformentioned a word?   I know aforementioned is around but what does preformentioned mean?  So, during this 7 game win streak, the Bulls had a sexy party with the hoop, scoring 100 or more points in 6 of the 7 wins.  Looking at a couple of the box scores, it looks like Ben Gordon got pretty hot fueling this scoring skeet-fest.  Good for him.

 

 

Best win

Surprisingly, this one is easy because it was night one of the NBA season.  The Bulls opened the season in prime time, against the defending NBA Champion Miami Heat.  I remember the game vividly, I was working out at the Fitness Formula Club on Waveland that night.  You don’t look like this naked without putting time in the gym, kids.  The Heat, led by Dwayne Wade, Shaq, Zo Mourning, Gary Payton, Chris Quinn amongst others, were absolutely mushroomed stamped in their own building that night.  The Bulls, led by Kirk Hinrich’s 26 points, gave the Heat the worst opening night loss of an NBA defending champ by the score of 108-66.  The Heat scored 30 points at half.  The Bulls scored 37 in the second quarter alone.  The first game with Ben Wallace provided lots of fuzzy feelings about the season.  He had 11 rebounds, only 49 less than how many millions he was being paid.

Longest losing streak

How’s this for symmetry (how do you spell that?  That looks wrong) Right before the Bulls went on their 7 game win streak, they lost 6 in a row.  So I guess it was basically a wash there.  The squad went from 3-3 to start the season to 3-9 quick,  More symmetry (?), the Bulls gave up 100 or more points in 5 of the 6 games they lost during the streak. 

 

 

Worst loss

I’m just going to stick in this 13 game W/L streak stretch that we’ve been talking about the past few categories.  I was just looking at the games in the losing streak and saw they lost to the 76ers 123-108.  The 6ers didn’t make the playoffs that year, and I didn’t remember them having much surrounding Allen Iverson v1.0 so I clicked on it.  The reason I declared this the worst loss was due to the contributions of their prize off-season pickups.  Ben Wallace, PJ Brown, and Viktor Crap-a combined, COMBINED, for the following line: 0 points, 2 rebounds, 1 assist, 0 steals, 0 blocks, 2 turnovers, 6 fouls, 0-3 from the floor in a combined 26 minutes of play.  That kind of production reminds me of the day when your boss isn’t in the office and you just look at the same websites over and over and over and then it’s finally time to go home.  Now imagine if 3 people did that.  Wouldn’t somebody in the office go completely bonkers on those 3 employees?  Well, maybe General Skiles did cause they did reel off their next 7.  Never mind on my previous point.  Just know that those three guys combined to suck a ton that night.

Best Moment

Although it could be the fact that the Bulls placed two players (Hinrich and Wallace) on the All-Defense team or whatever it’s called, I think the best moment is going to be the 4 game sweep of the defending champion Heat, especially since the Heat were the higher seed and supposed to have home court advantage.  Luol Deng, who has come to usually get some sort of injury towards the end of the season (see: year, This), he duct taped himself together to make it to this playoff series and happy we were he did.  Averaging 26.3 points, 9 rebounds, and 3 assists per game in the series, Deng carried the Bulls to the second round show down against the Detroit Pistons.  With the first playoff series victory since MJ, morale was high on the Bulls and focus was on a future NBA title.  I was on the bandwagon, sitting shotgun.

Sadly, that second round show down with the Pistons didn’t really go as planned.  Dropped down 0-3 in the series before it seemed like game 1 was even over, the Bulls fought back to earn a game 6 at home.  Where they played hard to keep up with Detroit, they unfortunately could not keep up their furious effort and were finally disposed.  Sad face.  But even with that, the series showed that the Bulls were finally ready to compete in big games and make some noise in the playoffs.  Or at least so we all thought (more foreshadowing so that if you made it this far, you’ll just keep reading whatever shit I write because you’ve come this far).

Funniest player to start at least 25% of the games

I spent like 6 seconds trying to decide between Chris Duhon and PJ Brown but I’m kinda ready for bed so I just picked PJ Brown so I can continue moving forward.  This 37 year old man averaged 6 points and 4 rebounds a game while playing 20 minutes per game.  Was it necessary to start him?  Why not just let one of those younger guys start and get some experience.  But instead this old creaky man started 49 games.  Does anyone think PJ Brown was ever very good?  Well, looking at his numbers, it turns out that these 49 games were the LEAST amount of games he started before he latched on with Boston last year.  Wow.  Color me stunned.  He wore 42 everywhere he went and then he got to Boston and changed numbers to 93.  Huh?  And I saw him at Great America once.  I probably should have just picked Chris Duhon for this exercise.  Fuck.

 

 

Other bozos on the roster

Malik Allen again, Andre “I’m out of the league” Barrett, Adrian “Fuckin” Griffin, Viktor Crap-a, Mike “he really liked his” Sweetney”s”.  That was a stretch, I know.

Leading scorer

Ben Gordon (21.4 ppg)

Leading rebounder

Ben Wallace (10.7 rpg)

Leading asssssssitsssssss

Kirk Hinrich (6.3 apg)