Bulls abandon Nikola Vučević Plan
The thing I always posited, was slightly proven and then made so I'd never be forced into defending it, was the idea of Eddy Curry starting at prominent center on a great team. A club winning games and multiple playoff rounds while working Eddy Curry more than half a contest. I thought it could happen, even by 2004-05, after four full seasons of watching Eddy Curry barely move on defense while infamously never jumping for rebounds.
He didn't get the rebounds he didn't jump for but he could score in his sleep and often did. Eddy Curry was the Bulls' Reverse Lee Smith, someone with touch and feeling to move leads in the first and third quarters before disappearing into shadows come crunchtime. To play Curry in clutch minutes would be a crank move, to borrow a word from a puppet show of the era.
Two decades later, our president is trying to get the guy from the puppet show fired, and I can trust that a big, disinterested Eddy Curry-type can live on a team with good defensive marks, like those 2004-05 Chicago Bulls (No. 2 in defensive rating with Curry playing the seventh-most minutes, working 63 games, 60 starts). Also, fall-on-their-face Democrats, I can trust they're around two decades later, and I'm seeing lots of photos of 2005-jeans online, though I'd be frightened to teeter in my old flares at my old age.
The Nikola Vucevic era is over, and it was mostly awful, he complained all the time and he never moved defensively, yet he was still able to remain visibly resentful without pushback because
1). Bulls are inessential.
B). Vuc's Touch.
Touch is nice, every team needs some and now Boston has more. Bulls get Anfernee Simons and Simons' $27 million expiring contract, 14 points per game in 24 minutes (Boston is the league's slowest team) on 44/39/89, zero starts. And, finally, after all this, a pick for Nikola Vucevic, a second-rounder, and I'm sure that guy will have so much fun at his single Bulls training camp.
