The real villain of the Bulls’ demise is Reinsdorf. And he shamelessly used a dead man to take all the flak in his interviews for Last Dance. Krause had his faults, and his neediness for public “credit” was chief among them. He won executive of the year awards, he was written and talked about (still is) as one of the best GMs of his era. But he couldn’t ever just let the players shine - I think there are a lot of difference here but THAT’S where any comparison to BB shatters. Bill knows he’s not out there blocking and tackling. I get that there is this belief that BB is a back room egomaniac who has been licking his chops to get rid of Brady, but I think he’s just an extreme pragmatist. They finally reached a point where they couldn’t legitimately keep Brady and give him a roster that they could expect him to win with. One Last Ride would have been nice, and I hate that Brady is gone, but it happened in 2018 and Brady just outlived it. Gotta teach em how to say goodbye.
Reinsdorf’s laziness, loyalty, and cheapass-ness are the real culprits here. Jordan and Pippen inflated the value of the Bulls franchise how many hundreds of times over? And this guy was too cheap to re-negotiate Pip’s contract because, why? He’d have to do the same for Bill Wennington? Lol what a joke. He was happy to let Krause take the heat because he didn’t want to spend $50m (probably at least for MJ, Pip, Phil, and a new PF) to try to run it back in ‘99. That’s ok, it’s your team, but then OWN that decision and don’t be like “oh well the GM was ready to move on!”
It can be seen with Krause’s successors, Gar/Pax, who got, oh, a solid 15 years of failure in before finally being fired (but not even fired, “reassigned”). It can be seen in his other team, the White Sox, where he has routinely maintained executives for decades despite them having outlived their natural tenure - they won the WS in ‘05, and once all the moving and shaking of trying to repeat that lightning-in-a-bottle season failed the team miserably, they finally just promoted the GM up to team president, and are in like their 4th “rebuild”, just like the Bulls.
The real “oops” for the Bulls in terms of the mismanagement of this situation was not anticipating how MJ and Scotties antipathy toward the franchise affected other players not wanting to come there. No matter how much cap they cleared, or who they drafted, no superstar FA takes Chicago seriously as a landing spot. To this day. I don’t think that will be the same for NE, partly because NBA was and is much more a players league. But there will likely be less of the “vet minimum” or guy-seeking-ring and coming to NE to chase it type deal for now.
