Young Bulls Paying Dearly for Past Deeds

Unfortunately for the Bulls, not only does what goes around come around, it’s required to keep coming around too.

The Lakers were there in the early 1990s, when all of a sudden, where there had been Magic Johnson, there was Sedale Threatt, when teams they’d stepped on and sneered at through the ‘80s rose to take their revenge. If Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weren’t available for payback, opponents happily ran it up on Threatt, Elden Campbell, Vlade Divac, Doug Christie, Anthony Peeler, Antonio Harvey, Benoit Benjamin, coach Randy Pfund, equipment man Rudy Garciduenas, anyone in gold and purple or traveling with them would do.

So it is for Elton Brand, Khalid El-Amin and Dargan Tarlac, who were in grade school or Yugoslavia when the Bulls began the first of their six championship trophy runs in 1991, but now must pay for the dubious privilege of wearing “CHICAGO” on their chests.

“Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant,” mused Brand before the game, “those guys, they beat up on a lot of teams and a lot of guys [who] are still playing on other teams. So definitely when they play Chicago and we have ‘Bulls’ on our shirt, they’re really goin’ at us.”

Well, not the Lakers, of course.

Right now, your defending NBA champions aren’t going at anyone that hard, except, perhaps, each other. The Bulls were within two points of them at the half before succumbing, 104-96, which is about as good as it gets in Chicago these days.

The Bulls are now 1-9 this season and 0-4 on this trip, having been treated considerably worse in all their previous stops.

In Salt Lake City Saturday, they trailed by 48.

Two nights before in Denver, they were down by 21.

The game before that was in Houston, where they fell behind by 27.

This was after winning 17 games last season while preparing to free up $18 million worth of cap room, before the big free agents (Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady) spurned them last summer, most refusing even to visit, leaving Coach Tim Floyd to come back this season with a roster even younger, not to mention less talented, than that of the Clippers.

The Bulls have six rookies, more than former coach Phil Jackson says he has ever seen on one team. Two started Sunday, along with two second-year and one fourth-year player, giving the Bulls a total of five years of experience on the floor.

And if that was bad, it was worse that the rookie starters were El-Amin, a No. 2 pick, and Tarlac, a European import. One of their lottery picks, Marcus Fizer, played 18 minutes as the fourth reserve off the bench, scoring two points. Their other lottery pick, Jamal Crawford, was the only Bull of the 11 who dressed and didn’t play.

It was a shaken-looking Floyd who started the evening, in the hall of the mighty defending champion Lakers, wondering what further indignity awaited.

“We do try to talk about the big picture,” Floyd said. “We’ve even gotten to the point where we’ve shown old Bulls tapes, because I think it’s so important to have a belief system in what you’re attempting to do, and not much has changed in terms of the system of play.

“I think when you go through difficult times, sometimes it’s easy to point fingers--[at the] system, each other, wherever, coaches to players, players to coaches--but you try not to lose sight of the big picture . . .”

The big picture is: if the Bulls don’t make more progress by the summer of 2005, they’ll be hard-pressed to keep Brand, who’ll then be a free agent, from leaving, which would return to franchise to square zero, which is where it was when 2000 started and where it remains.

“It’s much harder,” Brand said before the game, comparing this season to last. “We’re only eight games into the season but it is harder. Just because, I didn’t think it would be like this this year again. So far, it’s started off pretty much the same as last year.”

Here’s how bad things are going for the Bulls. Floyd came out of the dressing room after the game, an eight-point loss, and started his remarks with, “We were proud of our guys . . .”

He should have been. They showed up, didn’t they? Right now, for the linear descendants to the glory that was the Bulls, that’s not easy.