THE CHICAGO BULLS have a legitimate shot at winning the NBA championship this season.
For the first time in a decade, you can read that sentence with a straight face.
And yet, coming into the 2021-22 season, talking heads pegged the Bulls as play-in tournament participants at best. Maybe worse.
The most optimistic prognostications all still had Chicago behind Milwaukee, Brooklyn and Philly. But ESPN’s panel of NBA experts picked Miami, Atlanta, Boston and New York to all finish with better records than the Bulls, too. The Athletic predicted Chicago would finish 11th in the East. The pessimism around the Bulls, from all those sources, seemed to center on an assumption that the team’s newest addition, DeMar DeRozan, and its franchise player, Zach LaVine, weren’t a star pairing that could lead Chicago to more than a .500-ish record.
“Fake experts” is what DeRozan calls them, making air quotes with his fingers. He’s sitting in front of his locker inside the United Center, leaning over into a laptop on Zoom. “Obviously, you hear it all, about how it’s not going to work, this and that. Just every negative. As competitors, you hear all And he said the same thing to me.”
