WASHINGTON — The bad losses have already piled up this season.
A few of them still memorable like the meltdown against the Lakers, the no-show against the Rockets, and then whatever that was Monday in Oklahoma City, but at 10-19, Bulls basketball the last two months has become more blur than detail.
More excuses than accountability.
More talk than action.
An all too familiar stench that we’ve become far too accustomed to smelling.
Sure, it was admirable for vice president of basketball operations John Paxson to meet individually with a handful of media outlets on Saturday and take the bullet, but accountability without consequence leads to just more words from this franchise.
“I take responsibility for where we’re at,’’ Paxson said. “I always will.’’
Great, because where the Bulls are right now is lost.
They had set a course for a return to being an elite team at the start of this rebuild back in 2017, and instead veered left at a crucial time leaving them headed straight back to NBA hell. That’s what mediocrity is in the Association. Not good enough to be any sort of threat, not lucky enough to hit it big in the draft lottery, and under the false pretense that help will come.
Help is not coming.
Big-name free agents won’t join this.
They haven’t in better times, they won’t in the next few years like the organization was counting on.
This rebuild has been one miscalculation after another, and started with the very first bricks of the foundation when they initially felt that Jimmy Butler’s price tag was too high a ransom to pay. A handful of trades, three free-agent offseasons, and three drafts later, they still haven’t come close to matching the skillset Butler brought on a nightly basis.
Old news? Absolutely. But also a specter that continually hangs over this entire rebuild.
And not the only one.
As if trading away a top three two-way player wasn’t enough, they’ve remained tone deaf to the obvious. Look, the entire city understands that Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf puts members of his front office on lifetime scholarships. Fine, it’s his dime.
But when an organization has to hide one of those front office members from the public eye like the Bulls do with general manager Gar Forman it’s an indictment on not only his incompetence, but an admittance of their own incompetence.
The Sun-Times reported back on Nov. 26, that Reinsdorf was finally starting to come under the realization that Forman as a GM was not working, and if this season continued to spiral a change might have to come. That remains in play, especially a scenario where Forman would be repositioned in the organization.
However, all of that could be too late for this version of the rebuild.
A year ago, they had an opportunity to go after a Trajan Langdon — a then-assistant GM with the Brooklyn Nets. Of course Langdon was hired by the Pelicans in the summer to take over their GM responsibilities, with the Bulls opting to chew on the same old stale loaf of bread.
What this front office needs more than anything is a set of new eyes, a new voice in the room. More importantly, a personality that come free agency, can make a player feel like Chicago is a destination place rather than a used car lot.
Otherwise, this will stay business as usual, and bad business at that.
Blowing a 26-point lead to start this four-city road trip is a microcosm of all things Bulls the last three years.
One big bad blurry mess with no end in sight.
