Last Tuesday, I texted one of my friends that if the Chicago Bulls traded for Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s considered one of the greatest players in the NBA currently, I would shave my head. I was planning to have my Britney Spears 2007 moment because we’d have to trade some of our best players for Antetokounmpo. 

The Bulls didn’t acquire him, so thankfully I didn’t have to shave my head. But the Bulls decided to go ahead and trade some of their best players.

My sister texted the family group chat that there were rumors that Coby White, the starting point guard the Bulls drafted in 2019, would get traded. I was telling my family, and mainly myself, that nothing was set in stone yet. 

Sadly, my delusion did not last very long. A day later, my sister sent a tweet from NBA insider Shams Charania on X saying that Coby White was being traded to the Charlotte Hornets. While one side of me is happy that he’s returning to the place where he was born and raised, the other side of me wants to scream into my pillow for the rest of eternity.

The Chicago Bulls have been silent the past few years during trade deadlines. Before this random pack of trades that the Bulls decided to make within the past week or so, they have only made 12 trades since Artūras Karnišovas, the current executive vice president of basketball operations, joined in 2020.

From Jan. 31 to Feb. 5, which was the last day of the NBA trade deadline, the Bulls made seven trades and traded eight of their players. From these trades, they acquired 10 second-round NBA draft picks. 

They’ve traded away plenty of good players over the years — Zach LaVine, Demar DeRozan, Alex Caruso, Nikola Vučević, Lonzo Ball — and they couldn’t grab a single first round draft pick? How embarrassing.

Before the very end of the trade deadline, the Bulls did not have a single player that was over six-foot-nine. Chicago Bulls fans, even NBA fans, were confused as to how the Bulls didn’t have anyone taller than six-foot-nine because 20 out of 30 NBA teams have at least one player that’s seven feet tall or taller.

The Bulls were probably sick and tired of all the slander that they got, so they landed Nick Richards, a 6-foot-11 center, with just a few minutes to spare before the trade deadline. 

I thought Gar Forman, the former Chicago Bulls general manager, and John Paxson, the former Chicago Bulls vice president of basketball operations, were bad at their jobs. Both of them were fired due to fans sharing their outrage, like when they traded away Jimmy Butler in 2017. But Karnišovas and Marc Eversley, the current general manager, are making Forman and Paxon look like the smartest people on the planet.

I’m also heartbroken that Chicago Bulls guard Ayo Dosunmu is leaving. He’s a Chicago-born guy who attended Morgan Park High School and went to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was drafted by the Bulls in 2021, and now they’ve traded him to the Minnesota Timberwolves. 

Anyone who has talked to me within the past week knows I’m devastated, just like every other Chicago Bulls fan. I don’t know if there are even any left at this point because of how shocking these trades have been.

I’m not happy with these trades because it seems like the Bulls have been “rebuilding” every year since the year I was born. The Bulls haven’t been the greatest this year, but the players truly seemed to like playing with each other. I always loved seeing Dosunmu and Matas Buzelis, a fellow Chicago native, hanging out with each other and doing things like going to the Chicago Bears training camp.

At the end of the day, even though I don’t want to admit it, the NBA is a business. They’ve proven that to NBA fans with many trades over the past year or so, like Luka Dončić getting traded to the Los Angeles Lakers when he said he “thought he’d spend his career” with the Dallas Mavericks. No matter how much a player can be tied to a city, they will be treated like a pawn in a chess game. 

As White said the night before he got traded: “It’s part of the business, so we’re supposed to be robots about it, I guess.”

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