A PLAYERS-ONLY MEETING ON OPENING NIGHT? BLAME REINSDORF, MICHAEL

As if racing to see if his Bulls or his father’s White Sox are worse off, Jerry’s son might have to fire head coach Billy Donovan, who allowed Nikola Vucevic to badger him on the sideline amid strife

     On a night when Victor Wembanyama learned about foul trouble, while a lighter Luka Doncic doused the flashing cellphones in San Antonio, a 26th season of NBA routine continued. What, you thought the Chicago Bulls were late in throwing a quarter-century celebration for Michael Jordan? Thanking him and others for the greatest of modern basketball dynasties?

     Nah, this was a reminder that Michael Reinsdorf is the son of Jerry Reinsdorf, who owns the Bulls and White Sox and pathetically has won just one championship — without You Know Who — in a fifth decade of double-team landlording. And that the younger Reinsdorf, as president and CEO of the Bulls, is carrying on miserably with an irrelevant, unconnected status in that city and the sport. I’ve said forever that Reinsdorf & Son have botched the most prominent resource ever handed a sports franchise: Michael Jeffrey Jordan. He rambles on in his 60s, as the king of a sneaker empire and the first athlete to make Forbes’ list of 400 richest Americans, dumping his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets so he can make golf wagers somewhere near Palm Beach.

     But the team he left behind in 1998 keeps stumbling in 2023. The Bulls aren’t as horrible as the White Sox — yet — but you never know if Michael Reinsdorf, who is 55, might be in a dog race with his father to see who’s worse. At least the Sox won a World Series, which happened to be 18 years ago today. Is it possible the Bulls never will win again as victims of Jerry’s dynasty wreckingballing?

     You must ask when the disgusted troops have a players-only meeting in the locker room, after an on-court blowout between center Nikola Vucevic and old-school-dawdler coach Billy Donovan, on Opening Night of the season. This will be the only record the Bulls break since Jordan’s parting — a sudden rupture before the first 48 minutes are up in a 124-104 loss to Oklahoma City. We realized last season that the so-called “Big Three” — Vucevic, DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine — couldn’t play together, a mistake made by Arturas Karnisovas, executive vice president of basketball operations. No matter who is in charge, with Donovan the ninth full-time coach since the dynasty and Karnisovas replacing the dreaded John Paxson and Gar Forman. No one is capable of deciphering what’s wrong.

     When in doubt, as I learned for 17 years working in Chicago, blame a Reinsdorf. This time, it’s Michael, who hired the two men in charge and now must work on a new sideline leader if legal gambling firms are right: Donovan will be the first coach fired in the league.

     “Just unhappy with the stuff we were doing,’’ said Vucevic, who punched the stanchion of the basket before taking on Donovan. “I expressed it maybe a little more aggressive than I should have at that moment of the game. Those happen in the heat of the moment, trying to help the team win. You’re trying to win, you’re trying to do what you can to help your team win. I didn’t like what was going on. It wasn’t nothing crazy, no fighting, none of that. Just really constructive. It’s maybe one of the first times since I’ve been here that it was like this, and it was really needed.

     “Every issue is fixable. We talked about it. We’re all aware of it. We’ve just got to fix it now. It wasn’t so much my touches. More of stuff we were running that could have been better.’’

     More of the stuff? The big man knows more than the coach about schemes? When Reinsdorf and Karnisovas sought Donovan in 2020, only days after he and the Thunder couldn’t agree to an extension, insiders weren’t wowed. Almost 14 years had passed since he led the University of Florida to back-to-back national titles, and though he had Kevin Durant for a season in Oklahoma City, he watched him bail quickly for Golden State. Only once did Donovan advance past the first round of the playoffs. Had the game passed him by?

     Apparently so, even though Reinsdorf and Karnisovas gave him an extension before last season. How does Donovan pull through so early in a campaign, when sports-sad Chicago has only hockey superstar Connor Bedard to rally around?

     “I’m not going to sit there and say that it was bad, like people were tearing up the locker room. It’s not like they were screaming at each other,” Donovan said. “It was nothing like that. They were in there talking. I walked in and they said, 'Hey, Coach, can we talk?' I said sure and I left. There's nothing personal about any of this stuff. These guys do care, and they want to be better, but they know there's habits they've got to change, and they've got to break. And they're talking about trying to do that collective as a group."

     Habits they have to break? Wasn’t Donovan responsible for those matters in his first three seasons and in this year’s training camp? “I got all the respect in the world for Vooch. He felt a certain way and I said what I felt,” he said. “And he's probably not wrong for feeling the way he did, but how do you channel that in a way that galvanizes the group and lifts them up. In the moment, maybe I could've handled it better with him and maybe he could have handled it better with me. It wasn't anything disrespectful or anything else. I think he was just kind of frustrated with the way we were playing, and I didn't blame him.”

     There were more talkers than Vucevic. “You put up a game like this in Game 1, you're going to have some conversations. Guys are frustrated and you should be,” said LaVine, who shot 4 of 16, finished with 16 points and might be prime for the trading block. “It's a good thing, but sucks that it happened Game 1. It happened, and we got to go from there.

     “We just didn't respond once they did that run in the second half. Wasn't a great showing from us. Didn't shoot the ball well. Don't feel like we played with enough heart. And that's on us. Terrible way to come out and start the season, but it gives us opportunity to bounce back the next game.”

     The Bulls have been saying that for more than 25 years. Recently, when asked about his extension, Donovan didn’t sound optimistic. “I totally get and understand it’s a result-oriented business,” he said. “I totally get that what makes this place special is they obviously have a really passionate fan base. We also have an enormous amount of history in the past of incredible success. For me, I take that very, very serious. I don’t think that, however, my relationship with Arturas … or Jerry and Michael changes how I go about each and every day, trying to work and help our group the best I can.

     “I think for me, just throughout my life — I mean, this is even going back into high school — I obviously as a player was told to transfer: ‘I’m never going to play.’ I was told that at Providence College. Someone was sharing a funny story with me that when I was at Florida, there was a chapter in a book that said, ‘Firebomb Billy Donovan’s House.’ I understand the expectations wherever you’re at, and for me, I had five straight years at Florida when we had played for a national championship in 2000, and then five straight years of getting knocked out in the first and second round, and people weren’t happy. I wasn’t, either.”

     They aren’t happy now for deeper reasons. At least the Utah Jazz were trying to make money off the 1998 loss to the Bulls, selling a Jumpman photo over the team phrase. They stopped selling those themed jerseys this year, yet has the younger Reinsdorf kept them around in the United Center? They would sell. What other gear would a fan buy at a game?

     An organization doesn’t rub out Michael Jordan, and Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson and all the rest, without a firm historic backlash. The Lakers, the Celtics came back. Where are the Chicago Bulls? Will we ever hear from them again?

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.