Let’s talk about Jabari Parker and the Chicago Bulls

To really explain how we got to the point of former Simeon High School star Jabari Parker signing with the Chicago Bulls, we have to go back a few years.

The year is 2012, and the Bulls have just crashed out of the playoffs to the Philadelphia 76ers, following Derrick Rose’s ACL tear and Joakim Noah’s ankle injury. John Paxson and Gar Forman’s team stands at a crossroads: Keeping the team that just won 110 of the last 148 regular season games together in the hopes of rekindling the magic upon Rose’s eventual return, or treating the 2012–13 season as “lost” and entering a semi-rebuild until Rose is back.

As we know, they chose the latter. Omer Asik signed an offer sheet with the Houston Rockets, Kyle Korver was sent packing to the Atlanta Hawks for cash (he would be an all-star within three years), Ronnie Brewer and CJ Watson were waived, and the Bulls went from an ascendant challenger to LeBron James and the Miami Heat to an Eastern Conference afterthought.

How does this get us to Jabari Parker, you ask? Well, be patient, we’re getting there. The next three seasons saw the rise of Jimmy Butler into a legitimate star, even as Rose was hurt and then a shell of himself when he managed to see the floor. After losing to LeBron and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the East semifinals in 2014–15, GarPax pushed Tom Thibodeau out the door, tapping Fred Hoiberg to lead the Bulls back to glory. He did not. After missing the playoffs in Hoiberg’s first season, Rose was shipped off to New York and the reins were placed in Jimmy Butler’s hands, with GarPax promising to prioritize getting “younger and more athletic”… until the Bulls signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo.

The Wade/Butler/Rondo experiment lasted only one year. Rondo left as a free agent, Jimmy was traded to Minnesota, and Wade was bought out. The rebuild had begun.

So now that you’re caught up on the recent history of the Bulls, we can finally address Jabari Parker, the №2 pick in the 2014 draft and Chicago high school star.

Parker’s signing is the apotheosis of GarPax’s team-building strategy — and we’re being generous with the word “strategy” here — since they tore down the last great Bulls team.

It’s yet another example of GarPax chasing “names” when they don’t really have any other ideas. They pivoted from Carmelo Anthony in 2014 to Pau Gasol, even though Gasol didn’t fit with either Tom Thibodeau or the rest of the Bulls. They signed Rondo and Wade even though neither is a great shooter and both need the ball in their hands — two obvious problems when you’ve got Butler and Noah already. Doug McDermott was a prominent collegiate player for multiple years before the Bulls traded three draft picks for him (and two more to dump Anthony Randolph, who they inexplicably acquired along with McDermott), despite the fact that he was 22 at the draft and was hard to project as more than an elite role player.*

*Yes, there’s some hindsight bias here, but even with the numbers he put up in college, he wasn’t an elite athlete, he wasn’t a great ballhandler, and he didn’t jump out as an amazing passer. To bank on his being a star, you had to focus on his scoring almost exclusively, and ignore the fact that he was playing against less-than-elite talent at Creighton.

Jabari Parker is another example of this principle at work. He’s extremely well-known in Chicago and has the pedigree of a second overall pick on his resumé. Never mind that he has torn his ACL twice, he can’t defend, his numbers have never jumped out in a “This guy could be a star” sort of way, or that he’s played almost exclusively at the four, which is where Lauri Markkanen, the best prospect the Bulls have had since Butler, plays.

GarPax have also indicated they expect to play Parker as a wing, alongside Zach LaVine, which speaks volumes about how they scout players.

The way this plays into patterns GarPax have previously established scares me. LaVine and Parker starting together on the wing has defensive disaster written all over it. $20 million is a lot of money for a player that almost certainly wasn’t getting that much money from anyone else. And they could have used that money to take on a salary dump, the way the Brooklyn Nets did with Darrell Arthur and Kenneth Faried, or to re-sign David Nwaba, who actually plays defense and had a solid year for them last year.

Could Jabari Parker be good? I suppose. He clearly has talent, at least as a scorer. And his deal is constructed in a way that even if he bombs this season, the Bulls won’t be on the hook for any future salary.

But such is life under GarPax.