The Atlanta Hawks had a 3% chance to land the first-overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft Lottery. The Chicago Bulls had a 2% chance. By some miracle, the Hawks climbed through the late lottery, into the top five, and at last, secured the #1 pick. But miracles don’t happen to the Bulls. At least, not since the Bulls, with a 1.7% chance, miraculously won the #1 pick which would be used to draft Derrick Rose. We ended up with the eleventh pick in the 2024 NBA Draft.
This isn’t simply a rant that the Bulls didn’t get the #1 pick. We had low odds for a reason- we were the 9th seed. It isn’t that I feel entitled, that would be ridiculous. Anyway, it’s difficult to complain too much when the Pistons, who suffered a historically abysmal season, fell from top-3 odds to the fifth pick. It is rather, the death of the final ounce of (false) hope in the heart of a lifelong Bulls fan; a hope that the basketball gods would sink their hands into the lottery odds, like they did in 2008, and bless the Bulls with a first-overall pick to lift us out of the six-foot hole the front office has dug our team into. By 98% chance, it didn’t happen. Now it is back to reality, and the Bulls must face the bleakest future in the league.
“Face” might not be the right verb. The Bulls management has turned their head the other way from the disaster of their roster to count the ticket stubs from the highest attendance in the league- for the 13th time in 17 seasons. Because that’s the only possible answer for a team that has wallowed in their mediocrity for as long as the Bulls have: whoever is calling the shots doesn’t care. Whether that’s General Manager Marc Eversley or longtime Owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who also spearheads the equally hopeless Chicago White Sox, I’m not sure and I don’t think I care.
The Bulls continue to double down on the aging trio of Demar Derozan, Zach Lavine, and Nikola Vucevic, who despite not being hampered by any injuries, have led to nothing. They’re not good enough to make the playoffs but not bad enough to score a top pick. Yet the Bulls extended Vucevic last offseason rather than letting him walk. The Bulls pass over moving Lavine again and again. And most recently, the Bulls are rumored to extend DeRozan with a massive 2-year/80-million-dollar contract. All in the name of staying competitive. We’ve been anything but.
But who can blame them? Money talks louder than our digital rants and Twitter fingers, and it’s been plentiful. The Bulls continue in cruise control in the direction of nowhere at all.
