The Chicago Bulls are stuck in NBA no-man's land. From Jerry Reinsdorf down through the front office, that organization is chock-full of blatant incompetence — or at least passivity. It's so clear the folks in charge just don't care about winning. Not in a serious way. Chicago is content as a perennial Play-In team, which sucks. It's bad for the sport and worse, it's bad for the fanbase.
Few NBA organizations are so storied. The Bulls were home to Michael Jordan. That is a city used to winning at the highest level. Now, they're stuck with the Bulls, Cubs and Bears (god forbid if you're a White Sox fan). Just a bunch of teams glued to the middle of the pack. The Bears and Cubs are at least trying to break the mold this year, but it's all very bleak.
Chicago made a faint attempt to "rebuild" at the trade deadline, shipping Zach LaVine's albatross contract to the Sacramento Kings in a long-overdue parting of the ways. The Bulls also swapped Alex Caruso for the younger Josh Giddey last summer, which can be charitably read as a forward-thinking move.
After the LaVine trade, however, Chicago just sort of sat on its hands. Nikola Vucevic, Coby White, and Lonzo Ball are still on the roster, and now the team is winning games — a lot of 'em. Eight of their last ten, to be exact.
It's too little too late, and this streak just perpetuates the core issue.
Rather than tanking for Cooper Flagg, the Bulls are going to fight for a bottom seed in the East playoffs, get run off the floor by a higher seed, then end up right back in the same spot next season.
Subscribe to The Whiteboard, FanSided's daily email newsletter on everything basketball. If you like The Whiteboard, share it with a friend. If you hate it, share it with an enemy!
Bulls get extra motivation to stop winning games and bring out the tanks for Cooper Flagg
Every bad team (or even semi-bad team) should be tanking for Cooper Flagg. We want a competitive league that disincentivizes tanking, of course, but in the current landscape, it's malpractice for teams in need of a direction to ignore the race to the bottom. Chicago currently has the 11th-best odds to land the No. 1 pick (2.0 percent). If the Bulls win the Play-In Tournament, those slim odds will vanish entirely.
Flagg is the level of generational talent that actually changes the outlook in Chicago. All of a sudden, the Bulls would have their building block for the next decade — a foundational 18-year-old star with a balanced, two-way skill set and every winning intangible in the book. Flagg is so good that he's drawing comparisons to former Bulls legend and six-time champ Scottie Pippen.
From Kevin O'Connor of Yahoo:
"An all-time great who can do a little bit of everything like Scottie could resemble Cooper's ceiling."
If that doesn't make Bulls fans perk up a bit, nothing will. Pippen is an insanely high bar to ascribe to an 18-year-old before he even reaches the NBA, but Flagg's dominance at Duke is exceedingly rare. It's uncommon to see freshmen, much less freshmen who reclassified and arrived at college before their 18th birthday, produce as prolifically and efficiently as Flagg has. And yes, there are some rather obvious parallels with Pippen in terms of play style and skill set.
Both are 6-foot-9ish forwards who can defend at a high level, create for teammates, or score at all three levels. Pippen was a more polished creator in his prime (duh), but Cooper's 18. Again, he can get there in due time. Flagg leads all freshmen in BPM (14.9), which clears the second-best (VJ Edgecombe's 10.0) by a country mile. Flagg just outclassed Edgecombe head-to-head in March Madness, for good measure.
Ideally, the Bulls would drop the faux contender act and start losing games over this final stretch of the regular season. A 10-game losing streak wouldn't be great for the vibes, but it could mean the difference between another decade of nothing and a bright future in the Windy City. No fanbase deserves the next Scottie Pippen more than Chicago.