Reborn in Chicago

BOSTON -- Dwyane Wade of the Chicago Bulls was holding court, which is still a strange thing to say. If ever there was a player destined to carry on the one-team mantle from Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan, surely it would have been D-Wade, who spent 13 years in Miami becoming an iconic civic fixture.

Sitting across the locker room from Wade was Rajon Rondo. Even in the ever transient world of the NBA where we’re conditioned to accept change as a necessary part of the arrangement, the sight of these two former combatants on the same team -- and in Chicago, no less -- was still jarring. The two talked it over this summer after joining forces and shrug when it’s brought up.

"You better get used to if you want to be around," Wade said. "I’ve been around 14 years. I’ve seen everything that I can see." The Bulls are undergoing a fascinating experiment at a delicate moment in their history. After trading former MVP Derrick Rose, GM Gar Forman called it a roster reset. Many took that as a sign that the Bulls would build around Jimmy Butler and a cast of young players. That made even more sense once they also parted ways with Joakim Noah and Pau Gasol. Then they signed Rondo and Wade, and the reset became more like a rebirth, at least for the veterans. Cast aside by the Heat, Wade returned home to Chicago a hero. After a year in exile, Rondo is once again a figure of importance. Still, adding those two to a team that already had an emerging star in Butler seemed curious on paper and looked downright ridiculous under scrutiny. It’s not just that the Bulls have doubters. Their offseason maneuvers were uniformly panned and it wasn’t a question of if they would implode, but when. Mere moments after the shock of Wade’s signing began to wear off, the consensus quickly formed that there was no way these three headstrong players could coexist on the same team. Having three perimeter players who aren’t great shooters also didn’t seem like the best idea in a modern NBA that prizes spacing.

That became the conventional offseason wisdom, solidifying a narrative template for the season that was still months from playing out. Amusingly, it took only three games for the masses to completely change course and declare all that we once knew to be self-evident was now passé. After opening the season with three straight wins, maybe the Bulls were just weird enough to work.

Then came three straight losses and suddenly the Bulls are right back where we thought they would be, which is somewhere in the Eastern Conference’s vast middle. Such is the state of the franchise a mere six games into the regular season. It’s too much to process at this early stage of the season and the Bulls don’t really care anyway.

"No one knows what this team can be," Wade told me me between pitches during Game 7 of the World Series. "No one."

"If we cared about people questioning us we wouldn’t even be in the NBA," Wade continued. "No one gave a lot of us a chance to even get here, so outside perspective is what it is. It’s an observation. It’s someone’s perspective. That’s not for us to concern ourselves with, our job is to find a way to be as good as you can be as a team."

Through the first week of the season, the Bulls have been one of the league’s early surprises. They opened the season with three straight wins including a victory over the Celtics and a pair of blowouts against Indiana and Brooklyn. Then they dropped a hard-fought rematch with the C’s and gave up 117 points against a struggling Knicks team in what happened to be Rose and Noah’s return to Chicago. The next night they were trounced on the road by the Pacers. The pendulum swings wildly in the early stages of a season and there’s a healthy amount of skepticism, primarily in regards to their shooting. But there’s also cause for cautious optimism. The Bulls that we saw in their better moments are a team that plays together and may be more than the sum of their individual parts. In Rondo, they have a lead guard that wants to push the pace and in Butler and Wade, they have a pair of threats who can create offense out of nothing. Second-year coach Fred Hoiberg has done a nice job staggering their minutes so there is usually one of them on the court at all times. Add in complementary shooting from Nikola Mirotic and Doug McDermott, and a host of unselfish bigs known for defense, energy and rebounding, and well, maybe there is something more here. This is an ideal situation for Wade, who has spent the latter part of his career proving people wrong. Every time you think he’s on the downside of his legendary career, he reminds you of his resourcefulness. Nowhere was that more evident than in the postseason, where he brought the Heat to within a game of a return to the conference finals. However bitter his departure from Miami, Wade’s arrival in his hometown of Chicago has been marked by good feelings and better vibes. If there’s anyone who can bring a team like this together, it’s D-Wade. To a man, the Bulls all point to the same unifying force, that elusive intangible known as chemistry. And to a man, they all point to Wade as the key element. "He’s real calm, a real cool guy," veteran big man Taj Gibson says. "Real calm." That calmness seems to have trickled down to everyone else on the roster. Already this season, Butler has declared his allegiance to Hoiberg, a stark contrast from last season when he called out the coach for not being tough enough. Then there’s Rondo, who has knocked heads with coaches from Doc Rivers to Rick Carlisle. Hoiberg says that he loves working with Rondo. The first thing they did was watch film together and Rondo spent a good chunk of the summer working out with the younger players in Chicago. "We don’t look at ourselves as a big three," Wade said. "We’re just coming out here trying to help lead this team, and we’re playing basketball. Everybody is on the same page. You got one night where Doug leads the team in scoring, one night it’s Jimmy. That’s just the way it is." Disregarded in sober analysis as more voodoo than science, chemistry still has its place in the fragile fabric of a locker room. Of course, chemistry was supposed to be one of this team’s trouble areas, which makes the Bulls’ early season camaraderie all the more intriguing. "I’m not surprised," Butler said. "I see the way that we go about it every day in practice. The way that everybody’s always talking and communicating and hanging out with one another. It’s all smiles and it’s fun. Obviously it’s fun when you’re winning, don’t get me wrong, but when you’re playing basketball the right way that’s also fun." Fun hasn’t always been part of the deal for the Bulls. Even in their best years there was a grimness to their approach. But this is a new day and given their early work, perhaps even a new beginning for a team that had grown stale. If nothing else, the Bulls have offered a reminder that maybe we don’t know everything we think we know. "You put a team together, you work hard in training camp you just don’t know what’s going to happen," Wade said. "You get what you get with how hard you work and we worked hard on togetherness and communication in a very short period of time." The buses were waiting and the Bulls had a plane to catch, but there they all were watching the World Series, hanging out together. The cynic in all of us says that this can’t last. We’ll certainly know a lot more about this newfound togetherness after they try to bounce back from this losing streak. Still, it was barely a week ago when it all felt right. The truth will reveal itself soon enough.

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