NEWSLETTER
With news of the NBA officially renaming the bulk of their annual awards after NBA legends – which included creating the “Michael Jordan Trophy” for the MVP winner – the jokes have been plentiful.
Fake trophy ideas, in particular, have become a brief trend in the social media world over the last 24 hours. And I thought I might as well hop aboard (with a Bulls twist, of course).
Here’s what I’ve come up with …
- If we’re being real, the Dennis Rodman Trophy should go to the NBA’s best rebounder each season. If we’re being awesome, then the trophy should 100 percent go to the league’s hardest partier. Strip club visits per city would be one of the most important stats to take into account for this one.
- An obvious route for the Scottie Pippen Trophy would be to hand it to the league’s best sidekick. But I think it should probably represent the NBA’s most underpaid player. We all knew that man deserved far more money in his pocket, and there is always someone each year that performs far above his respective pay grade.
- The Tim Floyd Trophy goes to the NBA’s worst coach. I tweeted out some of these yesterday, and it didn’t take long for folks to tell me that Jim Boylen should be the representative here. I’m not necessarily saying that’s the wrong choice, but I also think we forget just how awful the Floyd Era was. His winning percentage with the franchise sits at a disgusting 20.5 percent, while Boylen’s is actually at 31.7 percent. The case could surely be made that Floyd had an even worse roster, but the guy literally never won more than 17 games while at the helm of the team and has to resign mid-season. It was a true disaster.
- The Toni Kukoc Trophy goes to the player who’s stuck in the wrong era. I stand by the fact that if Kukoc was in his prime today, he would easily be one of the NBA’s premier talents. His combination of size, shooting, and passing would fit somewhat effortlessly into the pace-and-space style that now dominates the league. Current candidates for this award are guys like Jakob Poeltl, Draymond Green, P.J. Tucker, Herb Jones, and Kyle Anderson.
- The Rusty LaRue Trophy will be awarded to the most irrelevant player to win a ring each season. Quinndary Weatherspoon would have likely won it last year and Elijah Bryant the year before that.
- A few more before we move on: The Joakim Noah Trophy goes to the player you would least want to mess with. The GarPax Trophy goes to the most hated front office at the end of each season. The Benny the Bull Trophy is handed to the biggest butterfingers (get it … popcorn … whatever). And the Kirk Hinrich Trophy goes to whoever tackles LeBron. K. We’re done.
- Steve Kerr knows what’s up.
- The Chicago Bulls will have their second mini-series of the season, as the Knicks come to town for two-straight games.
- The last thing this season needs is a loss on national television to the New York Knicks, so let’s hope the Bulls have shaken off any bad juju from Sunday’s last-second loss in Atlanta. The fact of the matter is that this group was one missed circus shot away from being on their first three-game winning streak of the season. They pulled out a clutch win over the Wizards and blew the doors off the Mavericks to create some real momentum as they embark on a much easier stretch to finish out 2022. Now, against a Knicks team that has entered youth mode (benching guys like Evan Fournier and Derrick Rose), they have to demonstrate that they are the more win-ready team.
- Now, to the Knicks’ credit, they have turned their season around by embracing a youth movement. The team has won four games in a row and has held opponents to under 100 points in three of those games. With that being the case, it comes as no surprise that they have held the league’s top defense since the start of December. They have also happened to be the NBA’s second-best rebounding team this month, doing particularly well on the offensive glass (where they have gobbled the 5th-most OREBs per game).
- With Julius Randle, Mitchell Robinson, and Isaiah Hartenstein in the rotation, this game is going to come down to whether or not the Bulls’ can match New York’s physicality. Patrick Williams, Nikola Vucevic, and Andre Drummond need to help set the tone underneath the rim and keep a Knicks squad that scores the fourth-most points in the paint per game under control.
- I’m not exactly sure why the Bulls haven’t given Dalen Terry a shot. It’s not like the current rotation has been working any magic, and Terry’s whole thing is being an unselfish energy driver. He feels like the exact kind of talent that could be worth an extra look when things are going so poorly, but I guess head coach Billy Donovan doesn’t see it that way yet:
“If you’re throwing him in the rotation you’re having to sit somebody else,” Donovan told Darnell Mayberry of The Athletic. “And right now, clearly, I don’t think he’s at the level of some of our guys. Not to say that he can’t get there at some point. But probably right now as a younger player, as he continues to learn and grow I think there’s got to be a really good balance organizationally that we do between G-League games, practices with us and if he does get an opportunity to get in there, to play.”
- On one hand, I get it. I’m not behind the scenes seeing how he is against this current roster competition, and I’m also not exactly sure who Terry would or should play over right now. On the other hand, things have just been bad. He doesn’t need to get a permanent spot in the rotation at the moment, but maybe letting him eat some of the minutes Coby White and/or Derrick Jones Jr. is seeing couldn’t hurt.
- If freaking out over free-throw shooting footage is your thing, here …
- Even in the thick of an underwhelming season, it’s still cool to see what these guys are doing on an individual basis:
- The G-League is fun:
- Are the Bears ready to reinvent this roster this offseason?
- Because the Cubs sure weren’t!
