#FireGarPax
The people’s billboard is nice, but change is still far away
“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
For the last five-some years, Bulls fans have made their displeasures with the team’s front office known loud and clear. On Wednesday afternoon, we saw perhaps the most tangible form of their discontent to date, in the form of a large billboard on the corner of Lake and Racine in Chicago’s Near West Side neighborhood.
You should know the story by now. On June 22, the Bulls entered the NBA Draft with Jimmy Butler, a top-10 player, on a bargain contract for the next two years. When the night was over, both Butler and their own mid-first-round draft pick were gone, and in their place were Kris Dunn, Zach LaVine and whoever was on the board at No. 7 when Gar Forman hurriedly typed DraftExpress.com on his smartphone (the sweet shooting, no-defense big man Lauri Markkanen). REMINDER: This was a trade that was floated at the same time last year and dismissed by most for being too lopsided in the Wolves’ favor. Since then, Jimmy got better, Dunn had a terrible rookie season and LaVine tore his ACL, but the Bulls’ front office still hastily pushed it through to compensate for their own lack of negotiating skills and creativity.
Despite Bulls fans’ ever-growing numbness to nonsensical moves and lopsided deals, on this horrid night, one enterprising follower decided that he had finally had enough. Armed with an idea and a GoFundMe account, Indiana native Brandon Henderson started a crowdfunding campaign for a billboard that would voice the fans’ frustration. The campaign quickly made it’s way to the Bulls’ subreddit community, where like-minded fans eagerly pooled their funds together to make the vision a reality. $8,000 dollars, 30 days and a couple of setbacks later, and here we are with this anonymously designed (but very aesthetically pleasing) billboard.
So, what does this mean for the Bulls in the long run? Nothing, really. Stationed under a mile away from the United Center, there’s a chance that Gar Forman or John Paxson may drive by this billboard. They’ll probably see it out of their peripheral vision, and then proceed to ignore it. If they’re having a bad day, they may even dig their fingernails into the steering wheel as they pass it by. But by no means is this billboard a harbinger of things to come. Both Forman and Paxson have been employed in the Bulls organization for over 15 years, and despite their meager list of accomplishments, they will not be fired as long as Jerry Reinsdorf is their employer. The Reinsdorf-owned White Sox were primed to keep former player Robin Ventura as manager in 2017 after a fourth straight sub-.500 season, before he fired himself upon realizing that Reinsdorf was never gonna do it. Results don’t matter. Fan uproar doesn’t matter. Billboards don’t matter. Loyalty matters, and everything else is noise.
The end goal of the #FireGarPax movement is, as you can imagine, the firing of GarPax. But this is less of a people’s directive to the man in charge, and more of a collective shout into the void. The list of fireable offenses the Bulls front office have committed in the last five years alone is staggering. Trading Kyle Korver for a trade exception that went unused, somehow a worse return than when the Nets traded him for a copy machine in 2003; packaging FIVE picks, among them productive NBA players Gary Harris and Jusuf Nurkic, for Doug McDermott; flipping the aforementioned McDermott and beloved veteran Taj Gibson for Cameron Payne, who is a G-League player at best; trading Luol Deng for what turned out to be a second round pick, which they sold to the Warriors for cash despite selling the idea of finding young talent for a rebuild; and the coup de grâce, the Jimmy trade. If there was a way that these guys could be fired, they would be fired.
And so, here we are. Any hope of change emanating from Bulls fans as a result of this campaign is misguided. Try as we might, we cannot make the Reinsdorfs hire an analytics department; the closest we’ll get is the guy that counts how many Dwyane Wade jerseys were sold in the quarter. Ultimately, the #FireGarPax billboard is a physical manifestation of fans’ desire to vent. Venting is good, and it’s cathartic. The idea that people are gonna see the billboard and sympathize with the frustration fans have felt for years is nice, if nothing else. But we’re gonna wake up tomorrow, and Gar Forman and John Paxson are still gonna be making all the decisions regarding the Bulls, inevitably screwing up the stuff that doesn’t fall into their lap by chance (see: Derrick Rose, Jimmy Butler). One day, maybe they won’t be in charge, but I wouldn’t anticipate that day coming anytime soon.
But hey, we have a billboard. That’s pretty cool.
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