Chicago Bulls' mediocre offseason may have jeopardized championship contention – NBA Feature
For an offseason that was filled with so many surprises and ground breaking trades, the Chicago Bulls remained awfully quiet throughout the summer and free agency period.
The 2012 offseason saw teams such as the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers add great players to their roster to immediately move into relevance in the NBA. Teams like the Miami Heat and the Boston Celtics also added the missing pieces to their mix. And then there were 2nd tier teams like the Minnesota Timberwolves that underwent some serious upgrade.
Yet there were the Bulls, the team with the best record in the league for two straight seasons, which made no major move in the offseason, despite a desperate need to do so.
The Bulls lost their ace player Derrick Rose to ACL injury in the first game of the playoffs last season, and he will be out at least till February next year. His loss apparently confused the Bulls, and it seemed they wanted to wait till his return, observe his condition, before making any blockbuster acquisition.
But nonetheless, the Bulls became irrelevant through the course of the summer due to their inability to land some good players that were on the market and seemed to be a good fit for them. Instead, they went about changing their whole bench crew.
Omer Asik, Kyle Korver, C.J. Watson and Ronnie Brewer all switched teams this off-season. They were considered an important reason why the Bulls were so effective the past two seasons, and their decision not to retain any of them puzzled everyone.
In their place, the Bulls signed Kirk Hinrich, Marco Belinelli, Vladimir Radmanovic and Nazr Mohammed. Unlike the old crew, these new players are unproven and they are not an upgrade over any of the previous ones.
With Carlos Boozer, Joakim Noah and Luol Deng already holding heavy contracts, there is no doubt that Bulls General Manager Gar Forman and Vice President of Basketball operations John Paxson were up for a difficult summer, but they decided to not do much and wait for things to clear out, effectively putting the Bulls out of championship conversation for next season. Now, everyone is looking towards next season to see if the Bulls make any real moves to become championship contenders or not.
The least they can do is to retain Taj Gibson, because if this trend continues, it won’t be long before Rose would want nothing of the franchise.
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