Barnstorming: Joakim Noah and the end of an era
By Ian Levy
NBA players make their living, primarily, with their bodies. Joakim Noah has certainly done all right with his. He has earned nearly $90 million, won 353 games, scored more than 5,000 points and grabbed more than 5,000 rebounds, twice been an All-Star, once a Defensive Player of the Year, and he has done it all for the Chicago Bulls. Until now.
Noah’s body has been in various states of disrepair for several seasons. On Friday, it gave out in catastrophic fashion — a dislocated shoulder that will require surgery and likely end both his season and his tenure in Chicago. Noah is an unrestricted free agent this summer and had already voiced some displeasure at being moved to the bench. Between his slide in effectiveness and his reaction to the team’s adjustment, it seemed all but certain that he was on his way out. This surgery will likely seal the deal.
Basketball has emotional and intellectual elements, but the body is the vessel that makes use of them. If leadership skills and basketball knowledge were the only prerequisites, Gregg Popovich would be an MVP many times over. But you need a frame with long arms and quick feet to turn the products of the mind into on-court production. For the last decade or so the Chicago Bulls have been defined by, both limited by and elevated by, the body. Perhaps as much as any other organization in the league.
To say that the Bulls have played physical basketball is to retreat into euphemism. They have consistently won more games than they were supposed to, and they have done so, generally, by getting more out of their bodies than anyone else. They have run faster and farther, pushed more and bumped harder. Scott Skiles brought this aesthetic, the players internalized it, and then Tom Thibodeau carried the whole thing to a crescendo. Chicago leaned on Thibodeau’s defensive schemes, but the magic wasn’t in the design. It was in the full-throated buy-in and the full-throttle execution. Any team in the league could have borrowed the underlying system, and many did. No one could do it as well as Thibodeau’s Bulls because no one else could carry hurricane intensity through the maze of precise rotations. To watch those Chicago teams play defense was to watch a ballet performed at a full sprint.
The stars of this era — Noah, Derrick Rose, Jimmy Butler, Taj Gibson, Kirk Hinrich, Luol Deng, Carlos Boozer, Andres Nocioni — varied in size and skill but they all share this same aesthetic. That is to say they did different things but in similar ways. Butler draping himself all over an opposing scorer to deny him the ball is connected to Taj Gibson grabbing and holding and bumping as he tries to front a bigger player in the post. Nocioni and Hinrich have floor-burned knees in all the same places. Rose and Deng took all the same hits on drives to the basket, picked themselves up off the floor in the same ways. A body can replicate a motion with a different style, and for Chicago it was never touch or finesse or nuance, always power and strength battling through bruised exhaustion.
Chicago traded this physical currency for wins, but the cost was, increasingly, more than they bargained for. For as much as the body gave them, Chicago’s greatest failings have come when the body has given out. Rose was the MVP of the league, and then he was the guy who played in only 38 percent of his team’s games over the next four and a half years. All that physical brilliance has gone out of him and now, having lost the only kinetic style he’s ever known, he’s a fish out water. Losing a battle with his own knees and legs, threatening to bury himself under a mountain of missed mid-range jumpers. Noah has fought the same battles just to get healthy enough to be himself, at whatever capacity possible. Concerns about Thibodeau running his players into the ground was one of the major reasons he was replaced by Fred Hoiberg this past summer. Although it requires some assumptions, the relatively poor orthopedic health of Noah, Rose, Deng, Gibson and other Bulls can be connected, to some degree, to both the style of player and the extended minutes they were asked play.
While Noah’s injury is pulling a curtain on a certain way of doing business for the Bulls, the franchise began laying the groundwork long ago. Nikola Mirotic. Pau Gasol. Mike Dunleavy. Doug McDermott. Even Tony Snell. These are not Bulls of the Thibodeau mold. Although both old and young, they use their bodies in ways that represent the new NBA — shooting and skill and space to operate in. They conserve physicality as a resource, rather than wield it as a weapon. Finesse is their armor, touch is their shield, and they have been welcomed into the brotherhood of the cudgel. Their presence and the lighter hand of Hoiberg are supposed to replenish the dwindling supply of run-through-a-brick-wall physicality. Even Jimmy Butler seems to be in the process of conversion.
But the transition is not complete, and there are still a few vestiges of the old way to be eroded – a few more physical dollars and cents to be spent. Noah’s account is empty, and he will likely take his business elsewhere when it is replenished enough to start diving for loose balls and throwing his body into box-outs. Rose’s deposits are being drawn down, as well, and will find themselves exhausted someday soon. The league has moved past these Bulls. Their blood, sweat and tears approach seems uncouth in today’s NBA of rigid control. They are berserkers and barbarians when the league is going the way of Buddha. One does not use their body quite so callously now, the cost is too great and the Chicago Bulls have paid it one too many times.