The Chicago Bulls Versus the Chicago Bulls

The Chicago Bulls are becoming a modern NBA team, and the transition hasn't been pretty. Aesthetics, to be fair, was never a huge part of what made previous Bulls teams what they were. Tom Thibodeau's squad has trumped regular-season expectations in recent years by hustling hungrily, winning top Eastern Conference seeds despite repeat injuries to Derrick Rose and other key players. These teams have not been great, exactly, but they have established themselves as one of the NBA's great nuisances. They played defense with relentless, principled intensity every night and persisted through bad spacing and a lack of shot-makers on offense; they were better than they had any right to be, even if they often looked worse than they were.

This has made Chicago, despite oft-fugly halfcourt sets, one of the best regular season watches in the contemporary NBA. Like a college team stunting on the pros, Thibodeau's Bulls often seemed smaller, more earnest, and somehow different. That was the romance, anyway. It's false in the way most romantic readings of basketball teams are, but it does authentically respect an ethic that Chicago loves, for better and for worse. The city's real enthusiasm for the UnbreakaBulls often manifests in alternately confounding and ridiculous ways. Talk-radio glorifications of 2014 Defensive Player of the Year (and possible victim of Thibs-Related Burnout) Joakim Noah exist in permanent contrast to Derrick Rose's perceived wimpery. The once-beloved point guard—a basketball prodigy Chicago-born whose body has an unfortunate relationship with gravity—has become a pariah amidst Chicago's exuberance for The Team That Won't Quit.

But in 2014-15, the Bulls haven't been that. The injuries have continued, but the energy in Chicago is different. After a string of disappointing seasons that started with championship expectations, Thibodeau's front office—led by John Paxson, the Zen-free version of Steve Kerr, and the mostly mysterious Gar Forman—has forced their coach to scale back his obsession with the Protestant work ethic. In an attempt to have a whole, healthy roster through a playoff run for the first time since Rose won the MVP in 2011, Forman and Paxson have strapped Thibodeau with the most progressive of league concepts: minutes limits.

These are not the San Antonio Spurs, though, and Thibs is decidedly not a minutes-limit type. While the team has developed a Spurs-ian on/off switch, its coach has not, and has not taken this direction without a fight. Thibodeau has become a somewhat snarky interviewee when he receives questions about the minutes limits, and his friend and former co-worker Jeff Van Gundy has taken it upon himself to be Thibs' crotchety hype man on national broadcasts, attacking Paxson and Forman's insistence on widely accepted NBA best practices as Noah would a pick-and-roll. The front office has more than tipped their hand by publicly firing back at Van Gundy. Rumors of a roaring enmity between Thibodeau and GarPax—reported by virtually every major NBA media member—are easy to believe with lines like this from Paxson:

"Van Gundy… has an agenda against our organization for whatever reason and has for years. I guess he thinks he's trying to protect his friend, but he's doing just the opposite. It's pretty pathetic when you think about it, and truth be told he owes [team owner] Jerry Reinsdorf an apology for his disparaging remarks."

Minutes, of course, are merely a symbol of what's likely a more fundamental tension between the Bulls' front office and sideline components—they just don't like each other. Thibodeau is ornery, and comes by it naturally. He's a genius of the game, and, like most geniuses, doesn't enjoy having his vision challenged or compromised. The front office, for its part, is far too sensitive and image-conscious to let the world see them as kowtowing in any way. This does not work any better than you'd think, taken altogether.

It is so thoroughly not working out, in fact, that many NBA observers now believe Thibodeau will be sent packing this summer. This despite being one of the most coveted coaches in the league and posting a .646 winning percentage in his five years with the Bulls. All of which leads to one simple question: what the fuck?

Watching a Bulls team that isn't allergic to malaise has been weird enough, but it has been downright surreal seeing their organization tear itself apart at the seams before the bottom line on 2014-15 has been written. The constant tragedy that is Derrick Rose has finally taken a backseat in narrative intrigue, despite his latest knee injury. The Bulls have become a team whose story is defined by rumors, speculation, and Sorkinesque behind-the-scene power struggles between non-players.

At the base of it all is a struggle over the team's identity. Thibodeau, like Mike Ditka before him, has become an icon in Chicago by winning and espousing a grit-first ideology that suggests "more work" is the answer to every dilemma, and not necessarily in that order. Today's "chill mode" NBA is a marathon that requires calculated rest and personnel management from its contenders, at least if they prefer fresh legs in May and June to proving a point in February and March. The front office, despite their high-handed approach, is wise to try to implement this, and Thibs is silly to fight it.

Everyone involved, though, deserves a non-passing grade. The Bulls have one of the best rosters in a weak conference, and are led by one of the league's top strategists to boot. Despite that, this has all somehow turned into a leaky and half-capsized ship, shot through with ideological holes. This speaks to a bizarre cognitive dissonance between the players, the coach, and the front office, and points to a chronic inability to communicate among all those parties. While it's certainly not too late for Chicago to bail out the bullshit that's presently swamping them and make a run into the NBA Finals, this has looked like a team at the point of collapse for much of the season.

Basketball, it turns out, is about a lot more than basketball. The Bulls have all the right pieces in place to dominate, but they lack the needed glue of a unifying worldview to put them all together into something efficient and consistent. Optimists in Chicago and elsewhere can hope this is all just unsightly growing pains. It may well be. But it could be more of a failure to grow, on the part of various parties who could all do well to grow up.