Guru wrote:He redid a team incredibly quickly and had them first in the East. And then Ball got hurt. People act like he would have just stopped building there. They act like Ball wasn't all that important. They act like the unknown of the ball injury wasn't an issue. They act like free agent additions are nothing. Caruso is nothing. Drummond is nothing. Drafting Ayo is nothing. It's a sad state of affairs for Bulls fans.
There is an argument that he built a great team.
There is an argument that he didn't do enough after the Ball injury.
Those are both fine arguments not greeted with equal merit
That is because they don't really have equal merit.
The good part of this was for a half season, and while exciting, had more earmarks of utter fluke than maybe any first place position that deep in the season in the history of basketball.
1: All teams are playing in empty gyms due to COVID
2: All teams are throwing out different rosters every night due to COVID
3: We won an insane number of games on last second shots (huge luck factor)
4: Our position of first was very brief and by a record that normally wouldn't hold first
5: Our net rating at the time would have had us as a 45 win quality team
In terms of Ball, sure he was important. He also averaged 30 games missed a year. We definitely did a lot worse than that, but injury risk was literally the #1 reason people didn't want to sign him, so it is hard to give him much of a pass for having no back up plan. It's also worth noting he leaned on Ball as an excuse for 4 seasons. Literally, he was talking about Lonzo Ball being hurt and how that hurt him in the fourth year of his contract. We didn't bitch about the 10x as good, MVP, paid 2x as much as a percentage of the cap, Derrick Rose becoming worthless as AK did about Lonzo Ball.
If I wanted to give AK the most benefit of the doubt possible, it would probably be that he made one really, really bad move (trading for Vuc). If you could remove that move things would just be a ton better for this team. Even in that year, Vuc was really bad, and WCJ (while just a guy) wouldn't have cost them any wins and may have added some because his skillset would have fit better. They'd also have had a lot more room to rebound with the Lonzo trade with two extra firsts.
The really inexcusable part isn't a ton of other bad moves, it's really just all the non moves. The Bulls went the longest in the NBA after the Derozan trade before making another trade. They didn't really add anyone meaningful after that either. I think Jevon Carter and Jalen Smith were their biggest signings. Letting all the assets rot on the vine, which was a problem in how he treated Zach, DeMar, Caruso, and Vuc.
I can understand not being as aggressive with this as I wanted (I called for trading everyone the summer after the Ball injury when I thought it was obvious this thing had no head room and our play was a fluke), but at the time, Lonzo was anticipated to still come back that year, and I get why they wanted to run it back. In September of that year though when you knew Lonzo was out for the year, you should have at this point said "this version of the team is over, Lonzo is never coming back". At that deadline a good GM would have started unloading people, not an aggressive one, but a top 10 guy would have known.
He didn't do that of course. He waited until the off-season, and of course it becomes clear that Lonzo is done as a meaningful player, and even a bad GM probably at this point realizes that this isn't it, and now starts unloading the guys with value, but not AK, he still lets everything go a full more year.
In the end, the time period matters here. You can't have success for a half season and then think people are going to care about 3.5 years later. He had so many chances to get out of this thing cleanly (which is actually pretty surprising to me), but he didn't take any of them. Reminds me of this old joke:
A big storm approaches. The weatherman urges everyone to get out of town. The priest says, "I won't worry, God will save me".
The morning of the storm, the police go through the neighborhood with a sound truck telling everyone to evacuate. The priest says "I won't worry, God will save me".
The storm drains back up and there is an inch of water standing in the street. A fire truck comes by to pick up the priest. He tells them "Don't worry, God will save me."
The water rises another foot. A National Guard truck comes by to rescue the priest. He tells them "Don't worry, God will save me."
The water rises some more. The priest is forced up to his roof. A boat comes by to rescue the priest. He tells them "Don't worry, God will save me."
The water rises higher. The priest is forced up to the very top of his roof. A helicopter comes to rescue the priest. He shouts up at them "Don't worry, God will save me."
The water rises above his house, and the priest drowns.
When he gets up to heaven he says to God "I've been your faithful servant ever since I was born! Why didn't you save me?"
God replies "First I sent you a fire truck, then the national guard, then a boat, and then a helicopter. What more do you want from me!!??"
He had both some good and bad luck early. DDR playing at an all-NBA player level on a 28M dollar contract was an insanely unlikely thing to happen. Way more unlikely than Lonzo getting hurt. If he had played his cards perfectly, he could have gotten 7-8 1st rounders for Zach, Caruso, Vuc, and DeMar. We would still be in a rebuild now most likely, but we'd be feeling pretty good about our odds of coming out of it.
Given the totality of everything, he had success for a half season with a crap ton of *s on it, and he had failure for 3.5 years after that with tons of obvious pivots he refused to take. When you weigh that, 3.5 years of bad decisions is a lot heavier weight than a summer of good decisions if you believe they were all good decisions.
