Chicago Bulls General Manager Gar Forman lied to the media several times about shopping Jimmy Butler, so on the night that he finally dealt away his franchise player, some backlash was to be expected. The 20 cents on the dollar the Bulls got in return for Butler also opened the team up to being heavily critiqued.
Forman probably didn’t expect to be publicly called out as harshly as he was by Butler’s trainer though-
0-82.worst culture in the league.I met drug dealers with better morals then their GM. He is a liar and everyone knows
— Travelle Gaines (@travellegaines) June 23, 2017
That tweet is pretty over the top, and it’s since been deleted, but the vitriol #BullsNation has right now is very real and quite deserving.
It’s also fitting that the GarPax (not a brand name for a prescription drug, but the horrific fusion of Forman and Chicago Bulls Vice President John Paxson) got totally fleeced in the Butler trade. Social media had a lot of fun with that tonight.
It’s a terribly run franchise at all levels, up and down, and they absolutely deserve every bit of miserable failure that’s inevitably headed their way in both the short term and the not-so-short-term future.
The main lesson one can learn from both the White House and the Chicago Bulls organization is this- always prioritizing connections, and therefore diminishing the importance of competence and talent will be your undoing.
In short, connections over competence is crippling. With the Trump White House it’s all about nepotism, at the Bulls it’s cronyism that reigns. GarPax, despite being as poor at their jobs as Trump is, aren’t going anywhere because they’re in like (Mike) Flynn with ownership.
Gar and Tom Thibodeau couldn’t stand each other, so Forman got his guy, Fred Hoiberg (a basketball Marc Trestman) in and the degradation accelerated at a more dramatic and rapid pace. Hoiberg was a disastrous hire of epic proportions and the team just keeps getting worse with him in charge as he drives talented players away. All the while, counter-intuitively, ticket prices keep increasing.
Tonight’s Jimmy Butler trade is just the start of the sell-off. Yes, they finally chose a direction after all these years of indecisive mediocre meddling (down, way down) and that was long overdue. However, things are going to get worse before they get even worse, before they later get better (maybe).
It’s about to get Tim Floyd dark ages bad up in this mother; maybe worse.
Not like the Chicago Bulls really care as long as they keep selling out the joint. They’ve led the NBA in attendance for so long and by such a wide margin that complacency has been firmly entrenched for years. Even when they’ve been “trying” in the midst of their “championship window,” they won just one, that’s right 1, playoff series the past four seasons.
What a pathetic joke.
Performing that poorly when they’re all in, now imagine how ridiculously awful they are going to be now that they’re in full rebuild mode. All the Chicago Bulls press conferences are mind-numbing, dumb-you-down corporatespeak already, envision just how bad the spin and propaganda will get once they start losing 65+ games a year?
Do yourself a favor, don’t give this team dollar one. Don’t buy tickets to this crapola. Don’t watch them on television either. They don’t even deserve a single fraction of a single decimal of a Nielsen ratings point from you.
The Chicago Bulls quit on you, so maybe you should check out on them for awhile- a very long while.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network and News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes to WGN CLTV and KOZN.
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