The Chicago Bulls are in a very weird spot. The core of Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan, and Nikola Vucevic isn’t quite good enough to guarantee a playoff spot, but they will almost certainly avoid the bottom of the conference. Teams stuck in that range may be in a worse spot than any other teams in the league.
However, the Bulls have come a long way. Arturas Karnisovas is determined to compete, and at least he’s been more active than the preview regime of John Paxson and Gar Forman, commonly known as Gar-Pax. Chicago wasn’t a huge fan of Gar-Pax, but Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Sun-Times recently gave the pair some credit.
First and foremost, Morrissey spoke about Gar-Pax’s decision to trade Jimmy Butler to the Minnesota Timberwolves. He admitted that the choice was a brutal one.
“Gar-Pax’s decision to trade Jimmy Butler in June 2017 is a hot topic of discussion again, thanks to the eighth-seeded Heat’s improbable run to this season’s NBA Finals, led by the former Bull,” Morrissey wrote. “The debate is whether trading Butler and a first-round pick to Minnesota for Kris Dunn, Zach LaVine and a first-rounder that became Lauri Markkanen was the worst deal in Chicago sports history. That discussion is more than fair. Butler stayed great, while the Bulls never got traction with LaVine and the rest.”
However, he also said that Gar-Pax deserves credit for drafting Butler in the first place.
“Paxson and Forman are still getting ripped for trading the physically talented, mentally tough Butler, who eventually landed in Miami,” Morrissey wrote. “But who had drafted Butler six years earlier? That would be Gar-Pax, whose names at some point were combined and abridged for ease of derision.
“This is where the lack of fairness comes in. Paxson and Forman get almost no love for taking Butler with the 30th overall pick in the 2011 draft. Here are some of the players who were drafted before him: Enes Kanter, Jan Vesely, Bismack Biyombo, Jimmer Fredette, Alec Burks, Iman Shumpert, Chris Singleton and Norris Cole, whom the Bulls drafted with the 28th pick and traded to Minnesota.”
Bulls fans don’t have to like Gar-Pax, and they likely never will, but at the very least, they made a great draft pick when they selected Butler. (They just didn’t keep him long enough.)
