Paxson to Blame for Bulls' Woes

Entering the summer of 2006, the Bulls seemingly had the NBA in its hands once again. For the first time since Michael Jordan has retired, the team had an actual championship in sight. Their young core, comprised of Ben Gordon, Kirk Hinrich, Luol Deng, and Andres Nocioni was only getting better as each season progressed, and the team had an extreme amount of assets available to them.

Not only did the Bulls hold New York's first-round pick in that year's draft, from an earlier trade including malcontent Eddy Curry, they also had an extreme amount of cap space, giving them the ability to sign the biggest free agents on the market.

So how in the world is it, then, that the Bulls today are a huge mess? How is it that a team with so much young talent is still mired in a rebuilding phase? The answer is John Paxson.

Paxson's off-season of 2006, which should have been a finalizing step to contention for Chicago, turned into disaster after Paxson made several key errors. To take the next step, the Bulls had needed interior scoring and an experienced superstar. The best case scenario would have been to acquire a player who could fill both roles. Instead, the team took a flyer in the draft on Tyrus Thomas, an athletic but raw power-forward, and passed up a chance at the polished LaMarcus Aldridge. Flash forward to today and Thomas is still just an athletic forward without much else while Aldridge is averaging seventeen points a game as a starter for the Trail Blazers.

Then, as if that were not enough, the team spent sixty million dollars, over four years, on Ben Wallace. Wallace, while a defensive beast in Detroit, had already begun to show signs of aging in the previous season with the Pistons. Furthermore, Big Ben had always been one of the worst offensive players in the league throughout his career. In his one-and-a-half seasons with the Bulls, before being traded, Ben was consistently booed and jeered by fans.