If you spent a good part of the last seven months trekking out to the United Center to watch the Bulls or Blackhawks, congratulations.
Your work is done.
Our boys of winter have completed the task of losing games when it matters, and you helped the cause by showing your undying support in hopes of a future payoff. Now that the ice has melted and the hardwood court has been disassembled, it’s all a game of percentages for the Bulls and Hawks.
The odds are firmly against the Bulls’ chances of getting a coveted top pick in the NBA draft because then-executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas made the fatal mistake of keeping three talented players before dumping them at the trade deadline to increase the team’s draft odds.
Mission accomplished, but will it mean anything?
Finishing in the ninth spot instead of being a play-in team, they have a 20.3% chance of a top-four pick and a 4.5% chance of getting No. 1. As a bonus, the Bulls got Portland’s top pick Tuesday when the Trail Blazers won their play-in game to make the playoffs, assuring them of two picks in the top 15 or 16.
So the news is not all bad for Bulls fans. At least you got to watch Benny the Bull spill popcorn on unsuspecting adults and Matas Buzelis dunks. And now you’ll get to watch Coby White, Ayo Dosunmu and Nikola Vučević try to enjoy some postseason success with their new teams.
Meanwhile, you can root for ping-pong balls to fall the right way, for President/CEO Michael Reinsdorf and senior adviser John Paxson to pick the right top executive and for Billy Donovan to stick around. No one said it was going to be easy.
“Every day is not going to be sunshine,” Collin Sexton warned us in February after his first game as a Bull. “Some days it’s going to be a little storm, a little thunder.”
That was before the end of an 11-game losing streak and Jaden Ivey’s social media proselytizing that led to his unceremonious departure, and the firings of Karnišovas and general manager Marc Eversley and Reinsdorf’s admission on Zoom that the Bulls brass had a long history of being poor communicators, and if the next executive “is not communicating … that’s something we don’t stand for anymore.”
It was as chaotic an ending as imaginable. Will there be less thunder and more sunshine under the new regime, or just new names and faces with the same problems?
The Blackhawks ending was less dramatic, with more pomp and ceremony due to their 100th anniversary but the same caliber of losing. They melted along with the United Center ice after Wednesday’s 5-2 win over the San Jose Sharks in the season finale, finishing 29-39-14 (72 points) — the second-worst record in the NHL.
That cliched no worse than a No. 4 pick, and the Hawks will have a 25.5% chance at picking first, 14.1% at second, 30.7% at third and 41.7% at fourth. Memorize these numbers for a possible pop quiz at the end of this column.
It was a marginally better performance for the Hawks than last year, when they finished with 61 points, got the No. 3 pick and chose forward Anton Frondell as the first of three first-round selections.
Few expected the Hawks to get into the playoffs under first-year coach Jeff Blashill, but many expected them to be significantly better by Year 3 of the Connor Bedard era. A season of around .500 probably would’ve been enough to generate offseason optimism, but at least the losing ensures more top picks for the future, and that’s what’s considered progress for Chairman Danny Wirtz.
Remember, the Hawks lucked into Bedard in 2023, when they had only 11.5% odds of getting the top pick, far behind Anaheim’s 25.5% chance and slightly behind Columbus’ 13.5% chance. When the Hawks beat the odds for the right to choose Bedard as the designated savior, general manager Kyle Davidson predicted “it can change a franchise, it can change a city and it can change an era in a team’s history. There’s a lot of weight to that and a lot of significance to that.”
Hawks fans bought into the narrative, and Bedard has done his part, evolving into the kind of star the organization needed — confident yet humble and always putting the team first. But Davidson’s rebuild has been a slog, with three coaches and not even a whiff of competing for a playoff spot. Nevertheless, the Hawks
The Ducks, despite finishing poorly this season, still managed to clinch a wild-card spot Monday and will make their first playoff appearance since 2018. In other words, you can rebuild through the draft and surround the kids with enough talent to win.
The brutal ending to the Hawks season since trading captain Nick Foligno to Minnesota on March 6 for “future considerations” can’t be ignored. They went into the season finale with only five wins in 20 games since that night. And after Sunday’s loss to the St. Louis Blues, NHL.com’s Bruce Miles wrote that Blashill questioned the team’s toughness down the stretch.
“I would say there’s probably a fragility to our team right now, more than even fatigue,” Blashill said. “I think some guys are starting to really probably struggle a little bit. The issue with where we’re at is we don’t have guys to lean on to pick you up a little bit when you’re struggling.
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“We’re kind of all struggling together. So, we’re grinding through it. These are hard, hard, hard lessons, man. But it’s also (a lesson that) life isn’t easy. You never have the opportunity to learn from it if you don’t go through it.”
You kind of feel for Blashill after losing Foligno, Connor Murphy and Jason Dickinson to trades, but he knew what he was getting into when he took the job. And if this team is too “fragile,” maybe it needs some tougher guys.
Bedard’s presence is enough to keep Hawks fans from tuning out, but sooner or later that will wear off.
Next year should be a fork in the road in the rebuild, and in Davidson’s career. There’s no good reason the ice always has to melt in mid-April.
