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It was a bad day at the office for Jerry Reinsdorf, who exited the Chicago White Sox game before the end of Friday’s 6-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.
In his suite at Guaranteed Rate Field, the two-team chairman watched the Sox bullpen blow a 3-0 lead to drop four games under .500 while also keeping tabs on the Bulls as they collapsed down the stretch in their 102-91 play-in loss to the Miami Heat.
It was a one-two punch to the midsection. Poom. Poom.
Making matters worse, his $215 million star, Zach LaVine, scored one point in the fourth quarter and finished 6-for-21 from the field. And his new starter, Mike Clevinger, thumbed his nose at the world by choosing Kanye West’s song “Gold Digger” as his entrance music leaving the bullpen, an apparent reference to the domestic abuse allegations he was cleared of by an MLB investigation.
If Reinsdorf woke up Saturday and used “agony” as his starting word in Wordle, no one would’ve blamed him. He has watched many worse Bulls and Sox teams over the years, but seldom have the two teams merged their disappointing seasons into the same time continuum.
Only 15 months earlier, at the start of 2022, Reinsdorf’s Bulls were on a roll and the Sox were considered one of the preseason favorites to make the World Series. Since then, the loss of Lonzo Ball ignited the Bulls’ fall from grace, while injuries and underachieving players helped sabotage the Sox last season and potentially again in 2023.
How bad has it been? Even Ken “Hawk” Harrelson blindsided Reinsdorf on A.J. Pierzynski’s podcast, saying he probably should sell the Sox.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
So where did it all go so wrong?
Flashback to mid-January 2022. Reinsdorf had long ago handed the keys to the Bulls to his son, Michael, who became team president and spearheaded the pivot from rebuild to reload. The hiring of Artūras Karnišovas as executive vice president of basketball operations in 2020 ended the nightmare that fans refer to with one word: “GarPax.”
The turnaround began at the outset of the 2021-22 season, led by the acquisitons of DeMar DeRozan and Ball. The Bulls were 27-12 on Jan. 14, 2022, and Michael Reinsdorf took a premature victory lap in a rare interview with ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
“When we hired Arturas, I was confident that he would help turn things around,” Michael said. “But I can’t say I thought it would be this quickly. There are no issues. There’s no drama. Just everyone wanting to get to the next level.”
Reinsdorf added that he wasn’t taking “a victory lap, but it’s nice to be relevant.”
Famous last words. Ball went down that very night with left knee soreness in a game against the Golden State Warriors. The Bulls later announced that Ball would need arthroscopic surgery on his left knee. A recovery timeline of six to eight weeks meant he would be back for the postseason. But Ball never returned and recently underwent his third knee surgery. His future is uncertain, though Karnišovas said he expects him back.
Without Ball, the Bulls fell to the No. 6 spot in the Eastern Conference last season and lost a first-round series to the Milwaukee Bucks in five games. Karnišovas gambled last summer that Ball would return and added only Goran Dragić to help fill the void at the point.
The Bulls finished 40-42 and shot 28.6 % from 3-point range Friday in the season-ending loss in Miami. Heat guard Max Strus, the former DePaul player who was property of the Bulls in 2020 when Karnišovas let him go, scorched his former team with seven 3s and 31 points.
Karnišovas believed the season was an improvement on last year despite the poor starts and even worse endings.
“Again, the result is not what we wanted,” he said Saturday. “We look like a .500 team, but the way we finished the season, I think we’re on the right path.”
This team couldn’t compete at the start or end of games, but Karnišovas believed the offseason will give them time to find answers.
“We have to figure out the reasoning behind it,” Karnišovas said. “The profile of the team, I would rather take this year’s than last year’s, where we were just beating up on bad teams. This year certain improvements were made, and I’m happy to be competitive in every game.”
He pointed to the 14-9 run after the All-Star Game, a stretch that included the arrival of Patrick Beverley and a decrease in minutes for Ayo Dosunmu. But that record down the stretch included the April 7 win over the tanking Dallas Mavericks, for which the NBA fined owner Mark Cuban $750,000. It also included five wins against four lottery teams — the Portland Trail Blazers, Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets and Charlotte Hornets — that also were in various stages of tanking for the draft.
For Karnišovas to rationalize the results of the final 23 games of a sub-.500 season proved the Bulls were on “the right path” had to be one of the scariest moments of the season for fans.
But at least that nightmare is over, and Reinsdorf can turn his full attention to the Sox. The injuries have once again crept up on them, but general manager Rick Hahn said the weather is a factor.
“March and April tend to be the coolest months when it comes to injuries as you ramp guys up,” he said. “You want to do better. We’re far, far, far from satisfied, but are we confident we’re doing the right thing, (that) we’re on the right path? Yes.”
In case you’re scoring at home, that’s two teams on the “right path.”
Imagine what the wrong path might look like.
