Maybe the most alarming part is that they really are better.
A Bulls team so green the players looked as if they should have been asking opponents for autographs earlier in the season has reached an NBA benchmark.
It is now mediocre enough to actually achieve what every other team in the league does without half-trying, and that’s to stay in games until the fourth quarter.
Even some of the championship Bulls teams allowed most opponents to do that. Michael Jordan almost seemed to enjoy it as they let the Charlotte Hornets of the world hang around and hang around, giving them just enough hope to actually think they maybe had a chance before reeling off another 18-2 run to put them away. Of course, the current Bulls, while finally being good enough to pull this off, are also bad enough to watch night after night as their opponents leave them in the proverbial dust.
This night-after-night business has now reached record proportions. The Bulls’ loss to the mighty Vancouver Grizzlies (13-34) on Saturday night extended their losing streak to 14, breaking a tie with the 1976-77 Bulls for this particular brand of futility.
Bulls coach Tim Floyd looks at his team’s improved staying power and tries to use it as a positive spin. “It’s just a horrible thing to say when you have our record, but it’s the truth when you look at us early in the season compared to now,” he said before Saturday’s game. “I can’t remember our last blowout.”
Not to nit-pick or anything, but that would be New Jersey, 123-103 two weeks ago.
Still, Floyd is neither an ignorant man nor a blind one.
“The truth of it is,” he said when a lame and somewhat insincere alibi was offered, “we’re not good. When you have teams with poor records, one thing is a constant, and that is that it’s something different with us every night.”
And often it’s the same different things every night.
If it’s not enduring long scoring droughts, as the Bulls did for seven minutes against Philadelphia recently, then it’s going 1-for-19 from three-point range, as they did against Vancouver, or being outrebounded by obscene proportions, which they do on a routine basis.
Not-good teams also seem to lose perspective, such as thinking that the absence of Michael Ruffin, second-leading rebounder though he is, is a devastating blow, or that Ron Mercer’s respectable numbers make him a great NBA player.
This much Floyd also understands only too well. “We don’t have a guy who has contributed to winning at this level in this league,” he said.
Fred Hoiberg is as close as they come, having played for Indiana, but odds are most Pacers fans probably are unaware he was actually on the team.
No, seven rookies and three second-year players does not paint a pretty picture. And suffice it to say, there is no graceful way to learn.
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“In college, coaches can schedule Southeast Louisiana, Florida International and Nicholls State to learn how to win, and then build on it,” Floyd lamented. “But in this league, you don’t have the opportunity to do that. In this league, we’re Nicholls State right now.”
All of this naturally points back to management and the compelling question of what it plans to do about it, which we’re sure General Manager Jerry Krause would tell us if it wasn’t of such a highly sensitive and top-secret nature.
Floyd said he speaks to Krause and Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf “all the time,” and though he risked the wrath of Krause for revealing classified information, he took that chance. “We know where we are and what we have to do to get better,” Floyd said. “We have to get more experience.”
A trade this month or free-agent move this summer for a player we have heard of might be a good place to start.
If the Bulls’ rookies were poised to develop into top players, the inclination would be to let them all be. Go ahead and develop to their heart’s content. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with this group.
In the meantime, Floyd said he is grateful that Bulls fans are still supportive of his 6-40 team. “One game they booed us, against Milwaukee, and we deserved it,” he said.
Team morale, he insists, is not a problem, even despite this latest record.
“I’m not worried about that being demoralizing right now,” Floyd said with typical aplomb. “We had a chance to be demoralized way before now.”