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The NBA Free Agency period official kicks off on July 1st when teams are able to start negotiating with available players. A weak class of free agent point guards is led by Mike Conley and Rajon Rondo. From there, the level of talent dips which is why we have already seen guys like Derrick Rose, Jeff Teague, and George Hill get dealt prior to the NBA Draft.
Here are eight NBA teams that should actively be seeking a point guard this summer. [Read more…]
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NBA Draft night saw incessant Jimmy Butler trade rumors, including some narratives that would potentially reunite the superstar swingman with his former coach Tom Thibodeau in Minnesota. Obviously, it didn’t happen as Butler stayed put, but the Chicago Bulls also took a natural shooting guard, how can also play small forward and point guard with their lottery pick at #14.
Yes, the selection of Denzel Valentine (here’s more on him), plus the Bulls selecting a small forward in the second round in Paul Zipster from Germany, again called into question the team’s future on the wings, as well as wonderment about the future of Jimmy Butler with the team.
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Denzel Valentine is the first NBA Draft lottery pick to come out of Michigan State since 2001 (Jason Richardson).
The Chicago Bulls selected the AP National Player of the Year and Big Ten Player of the Year with the 14th pick in tonight’s NBA Draft. Bulls GM Gar Forman said at the Bulls practice facility Thursday night that he thought Denzel “was a fit on so many levels, a big time winner.”
Forman also said that Zel fit into the direction that the Bulls wanted to go, indicating that the team is “wanting to get younger and more athletic, and play with pace.”
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The 2016 NBA Draft Lottery takes place Tuesday evening so the draft order will be official then. Here is a look at the second round of The Sports Bank’s 2016 NBA Mock Draft. [Read more…]
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Editor’s note: In the wake of today’s HUGE news, the Derrick Rose trade, we felt in necessary to republish this essay from April 2015. Enjoy-
We can safely assume that whoever created the Derrick Rose as Jesus Christ mural in Chicago was doing it ironically. The public wall painting, complete with tears of pain and a crown of thorns…”can’t be serious.”
We know that creepy, dysfunctional obsession with sports figures runs rampant in America; especially so in Chicago. Therefore this public art project analogizing the Chicago Bulls point guard to a popular Messianic figure is probably tongue-in-cheek.
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If they could help it, you knew the Chicago Bulls wouldn’t head into 2016-17 with both Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler on the roster. Whether Rose and Butler get along or not, how believable those rumors are, or what you define “getting along” to be, they no longer co-exist that well on the court together.
Both are a quasi-alpha dog, and you just can’t have two alpha dogs in the same backcourt. Butler may have more trade value, but Derrick Rose is the one who’s moving on, as Chicago has sent him to the New York Knicks.
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The 2016 NBA Draft is just days away! Huzzah! Here’s the link to our latest NBA mock draft.
ESPN will televise the 2016 NBA Draft on Thursday, June 23, at 7 p.m. ET. In advance of what is annually always one of our favorite days on the sports calendar, we crowdsourced the Chicago Bulls selections from our most favorite and most trusted NBA mock drafts on the internet. In other words, we did some mocksourcing.
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This is the kind of trade that pundits and sports talk radio guys would call…well, that’s just mean, the phrase that’s commonly used for these types of deals. You already know it, so I’m not going to bother repeating it. The point is, as Kent Brockman would say on The Simpsons, “this barely qualifies as news.”
Hey, it’s a trade between two big NBA brand name franchises and it’s official- so that’s something.
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Copa America Centenario kicks off tomorrow and we got on the analogy kick (pun intended) by matching a local Chicago sports franchise with one of the teams in the United States’ Group A and Mexico’s Group B. The Chicago Bears are Uruguay, the Cubs are the USA, the Blackhawks are Mexico.
To read why and how pick up a Chicago Tribune RedEye edition today, or click on this link here. According to the ESPN FC Soccer Power Index, America has the second best shot at getting out of group A. Here are the SPI percentage projections for advancing out of Group A and into the knockout round:
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Michael Jordan was the greatest of all time. There is no question about that. Still, there was a bit of a Hulk Hogan WWE style feel to the end of some of his games. Maybe that’s the wrong analogy. Perhaps it’s more Bruce Willis action movie style. You always knew Michael Jordan was going to win, but you always tuned in to see how.
Kind of like how you watched Bruce Willis movies to see what weapons he used, or Hulk Hogan wrestling matches to see how he finished off his opponents.
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Replacing Tom Thibodeau with Fred Hoiberg was a move the Chicago Bulls definitely did not need to make, and now it’s come back to bite them badly. Hoiberg has certainly become the Bulls version of what Marc Trestman was to the Chicago Bears.
In both cases, the team brought in a guy who never really accomplished enough to merit being given the gig in the first place.
Both coaches were hailed as offensive geniuses, but we haven’t really seen a truly elite offense take hold. As for defense, well that’s was like UFOs, poltergeists, the Loch Ness monster etc.- we can’t confirm actual existence of that.
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