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17 hours ago
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The Chicago Bulls have mostly spent their recent basketball existence stuck "in the middle," as ESPN terms it in a new article on Monday.
This season, though, the Bulls have been even worse than the middle, and so the question becomes whether Chicago can ever get beyond the middle.
This is a historic franchise, of course, with the six championships of Michael Jordan making the Bulls one of the most well-known brands in basketball.
Lately, the basketball hasn't lived up to that brand, at all.
Chicago had made it a habit in recent seasons of simply limping along into the Play-In Tournament -- never being bad enough to get a super high draft pick, but never good enough to make legitimate playoff noise.
The Bulls were very busy at this season's trade deadline as they recognized that it might be time to approach this in a different way.
"Chicago made a league-high seven trades ahead of the deadline that netted eight second-round picks and onetime first-rounders Rob Dillingham and Jaden Ivey," ESPN's Bobby Marks wrote.
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The biggest reason for hope yet is arriving this offseason, with a high draft pick and a lot of open salary cap space.
"(There) is the potential $64 million to use in free agency -- Ivey's free agent hold would need to be renounced -- and a likely top-10 pick," Marks writes. "The Bulls have selected in the lottery five times since Karnisovas took over in 2020 and have not drafted better than 11th in any of them."
The Bulls will never get another MJ.
But there are paths for them to return to contention. They've just got to commit to it more than their yo-yo plans have over the past bunch of seasons.
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