The NBA's lottery system is ruining the Bulls' feel-good story

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The Bulls need to start losing again and that is a bummer.

On Friday night, Nikola Mirotic drilled eight threes against the Pacers, and the Bulls rode out to another easy victory. After the game, he told reporters he went off because his son asked him to make all those threes before the game.

Well, kind of. His son only asked for five.

It isn’t the only way Mirotic has exceeded expectations, averaging 18.3 points and 7.3 rebounds since he returned from an orbital fracture, courtesy of teammate Bobby Portis’ fist. The Bulls were already primed for tanking when they traded Jimmy Butler to the Timberwolves for Kris Dunn, half a season of Zach LaVine and the lottery pick that became Lauri Markkanen. The punch, at the time, only solidified matters.

Except the Bulls are now 10-4 with Mirotic in the lineup, equipped with the last thing you’d expect to see from this team: good vibes.

There’s David Nwaba, a 6'4 small forward who went from paying the $150 fee to try out for a G-League roster to ending up in an NBA rotation and pestering Giannis Antetokounmpo in crunch-time in a recent win in Milwaukee. Dunn is morphing into Eric Bledsoe 2.0. Mirotic is finally turning into the offensive hub Chicago thought they drafted seven years ago. Lauri Markkanen, the Bulls' prized rookie, has legitimate star potential. On Friday against the Pacers, he scored a career-high 32 points. LaVine, the centerpiece of the Butler trade, has missed the entire season with an ACL tear and his return is just around the corner.

LaVine, Markkanen, and Dunn share the trappings of a formidable young core. There might be room for Mirotic who, despite being 26 years old, is only beginning to unlock his potential. But they'll need more firepower to build a core that can contend for a championship, which is the goal they implicitly set when they shipped Butler out and tore down a team whose destiny was to consistently fight for low playoff seeds in the East.

The future should look clearer today than it did at the start of the season, except every win threatens to put a cap on their potential. Herein lies the problem with the NBA's fractured reward system: For young teams, gradual progress is systematically stunted. The Bulls have quickly gone from being the worst team in the NBA to the seventh-worst. With a better incentive structure, that would be an undeniably good thing. But the pertinent information is actually this: If the lottery was tonight, the Bulls chances of snagging the No. 1 pick would be just 4.3 percent.

The Bulls should be the best story in the NBA right now. Instead, the best play is to cheer for them to lose.

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The NBA is on it, to an extent. Draft lottery reform passed this offseason, flattening the odds for teams in the doldrums. Starting in 2019, the worst team in the NBA will have just a 14 percent shot at the No. 1 pick, as opposed to the 25 percent chance it has now.

The 2018 draft is still governed by the old rules, so the question remains: should they ride out the wave, or blow things up by trading Mirotic and Lopez? The latter proposition is mathematically tempting, but it’s far more complicated and less of a sure thing than the solutionists would make you believe. Tanking won’t guarantee a top-five pick, and it won’t guarantee that said top-five pick turns into a superstar.

And given the current state of the team, openly swinging for the No. 1 pick in the draft could prove to be antithetical to their goals. Think of all the misery the Bulls had to overcome, and the fact that they had little to no incentive to do it. To punish a young team for winning could cause real rifts down the line.

Consider Bledsoe’s departure from Phoenix, for example. As much as it stinks to have a long wait at the hair salon, it’s worse to play the best basketball of your career and be rewarded with DNP’s at the end of the season so the team can notch some surefire losses, which is what happened to him last season.

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If the Bulls’ front office considers trading their veterans for less than fair value in an attempt to lose more games and receive better draft lottery odds, they should consider the message that sends to the rest of the roster. It’s not only a tacit admission that things as they stand aren’t good enough, but that they don’t believe they ever could be with this core. It’s a vote of no confidence in the success this team is currently having.

Tanking, especially mid-season, is never as simple as cutting dead weight. Real assets can be undervalued and sacrificed, and morale can be shot. Positivity is an asset as well, one the Bulls haven’t had in a long time.

Any move that could jeopardize it, even if it improves the odds of landing a future superstar, should be treated with caution.

The Season of Uncertainty

Christmas has always been an interesting time for the NBA. For casual fans, it has historically been considered the moment the season really starts. For diehards, it’s when the concrete really starts to dry on certain storylines.

This year, it’s been a combination of both. Contenders like the Cavs, Celtics, and Rockets have each amassed win streaks that have given them a formidable case as the the NBA’s best shot at toppling the Warriors. Then, there are teams like the Thunder and Wizards, who are just starting to get out of their own way and join the conversation.

A trimester in, we’re left with more questions than answers. Was Oklahoma City’s 12-5 December a sign of growth? If so, can they really ride with Andre Roberson— who absolutely hounded James Harden on Christmas — in a playoff series? Given their depth issues, and his defense, can they afford not to, janky jumper notwithstanding?

Can the Rockets, who lost five straight games after losing Chris Paul to an adductor strain and now face a couple weeks without Harden, reel in the heavy minutes they’re playing their stars? Can Harden, once he returns, get over wanting to be the regular-season MVP?

Are the Raptors for real? Can the Wizards get — and keep — their act together? Will Gordon Hayward return before the end of the regular season?

Most diehard NBA fans usually know the score at this point in a season. An 82-game sample size feels redundant. But this season has given way to so many new contenders and teams that are just figuring out who they are and what they can be.

For the first time in a long time, it feels like the second half of the season will tell us something.