Like I Said

WGN is doing a series of stories celebrating its seventy-five years of television broadcasting. A few weeks ago, they focused on sports’ anchor Wendell Smith, who as a sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Courier virtually took it upon himself to get Jackie Robinson into major-league baseball. This has nothing to do with that. The WGN story included a clip of Smith interviewing then-Bulls head-coach Dick Motta. Smith, Motta, a bunch of big guys running drills in the background—it could have been 1968 all over again, if just for a second. I don’t know what Smith thought of the Bulls’ teams Motta would lead, 1968-1976, but I sure loved them. Jerry Sloan and Norm Van Lier, Bob Love and Chet Walker, Tom Boerwinkle and Clifford Ray. The names still come easily to me after a half-century still. These Bulls aren’t those Bulls. Yesterday, the team announced they were shutting down guard Lonzo Ball, signed last season to run the offense. Only Ball hasn’t played since January of 2022. Two knee surgeries later, and he’s still not right. Maybe Arturas Karnisovas should have been scared off by Ball’s first surgery on his left knee back in 2018. The Bulls haven’t been the same since Ball’s injury, which happened around the same time Alex Caruso broke his right wrist; Caruso hasn’t had much of an impact since then either, by the way. So, are the Bulls snakebit? Maybe, but that can’t explain everything. Karnisovas also decided to sign Zach LaVine to a big contract, only LaVine is a one-way player, and defense ain’t his way. DeMar DeRozan is a wonderful player, a latter-day Chet Walker if you will. Only DeRozan is thirty-three and counting. As for the rest of the team, it’s like I said, a bunch of Greg Goosens. I also said something about a disaster in slow motion. At 26-33 and a six-game losing streak, things could be accelerating.