The Bulls have recently become obsessed with changing the narrative around the team.

Team vice president John Paxson spoke to “The Mully and Hanley Show” on 670 The Score early on Thursday and insisted that general manager Gar Forman didn’t get enough credit for his work. Paxson went on to blame an unfair false narrative for negativity surrounding the team, claiming that there was a belief that the Bulls did everything wrong. On Tuesday, newly-hired special advisor Doug Collins likened the team to a piñata, taking hits in the local media.

The Bulls seem to think that they are the hapless victim here, painted unfairly as an incompetent organization. But they are not the piñata. Rather, they are the ones wearing the blindfolds, indiscriminately swinging and striking out on their decisions.

To focus on the narrative around the team’s struggles and bad luck (like Derrick Rose’s injuries) rather than the actual, legitimate struggles that they themselves have created is another great accountability dodge by the Bulls. The Bulls have turned themselves into a national and local laughingstock with their ineptitude since firing Tom Thibodeau after the 2015 playoffs, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

Let’s look at the moves they’ve made in just the past year.

Signing Rajon Rondo and Dwyane Wade

The Bulls were in a great position to rebuild the team after trading away Derrick Rose and opening up $26 million in cap space to rebuild around Jimmy Butler. Rather than finding complementary players, they opted to mortgage future assets in the form of multiple second-round picks to open up even more cap space and sign Rondo and Wade to a combined $37 million.

Those two deals were obvious massive overpays as soon as the ink dried, not to mention completely illogical in terms of roster construction. Everyone knew that spacing would be a huge problem, and their 21st-ranked offense was a surprise to no one but the Bulls’ executives.

The Bulls insisted at the time that they had outwitted other teams by making short-term commitments to Wade and Rondo. In reality, they painted themselves into a corner and created additional pressure to trade Jimmy Butler.

The Bulls were faced with two options this summer. They had essentially capped out their roster if they wanted to bring Rondo back on his option and they had to know that Wade would likely opt back in. With those two eating up so much of the cap, they could either waste yet another year of Butler’s prime and run back the same team that everyone despised or start a rebuild by gutting the team. They chose what they viewed as the lesser of two evils by trading Butler.

It is difficult to overstate how bad those Wade and Rondo deals were. The Bulls were still on the hook for an additional $3 million to Rondo this year, and his true market value revealed that he’s worth about the minimum.

As for Wade, the initial hopes that he would lure free agents and provide mentoring for the Bulls are laughable at this point. His young teammates reportedly can’t stand him and the Bulls are stubbornly engaged in the pursuit of a Pyrrhic victory in his buyout, ignoring the implications that an ugly contract negotiation will have on those future free agent signings that they had so highly valued before. And really, how much more money do the Bulls need to save when they’re already spending far and away the least on payroll in the entire league?

The Bulls essentially lost a year (and a lot of money) by signing Dwyane Wade, when they could have begun their rebuild a year earlier. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

Losing four trades

It is hard to figure out which was the worst trade the Bulls made in the past year.

The favorite has to be the trade that shipped off Doug McDermott, Taj Gibson and a second-round pick for touted point guard of the future Cameron Payne. The Bulls stated at the time that they were “pretty confident” that Payne had overcome his foot injuries. He underwent his third surgery on that same foot earlier this summer and his career is in serious jeopardy because of how terrible he’s been on the court. The other pieces in the trade, Anthony Morrow and Joffrey Lauvergne, walked in free agency.

The Payne trade is obviously unjustifiable and will probably go down as one of the worst in franchise history alongside two other Paxson moves — the Tyrus Thomas for LaMarcus Aldridge swap and the draft-day trade to bring McDermott to the Bulls. There’s no “false narrative” there, and I would love to see the Bulls try to blame anyone but themselves for those missteps.

Along with the Payne deals, the Bulls also made a trade they definitely lost in swapping Tony Snell for Michael Carter-Williams, a trade they will almost certainly lose in trading Jordan Bell for cash, and a trade they will probably lose in shipping off Jimmy Butler for pennies on the dollar.

I’m not even counting more minor trade losses like the ones that sent Mike Dunleavy to the Cavs for no return, Jose Calderon and two second-round picks for nothing, Cameron Bairstow for Spencer Dinwiddie (a trade they won but lost after they assigned Dinwiddie to the D-League and let the Nets poach him for nothing), and the Rose trade, which they might have won had they not used the ensuing cap space on Rondo and Wade.

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There’s no way of spinning these moves into wins for the Bulls. The facts speak for themselves.

Those trades and signings also underscore the importance of having different viewpoints in the room. The Bulls brought in Collins with the idea that he’d be a fresh voice and another set of eyes, but he’s the same old-school type of basketball guy that the Bulls already have.

Wade, Rondo, Payne, Carter-Williams, Zach LaVine and Kris Dunn all graded out poorly in various all-in-one metrics at the time of their acquisitions. Looking at any of those moves from an analytics perspective would have immediately raised huge red flags that they were not smart additions, which is why the Bulls desperately need to empower and add to their analytics staff.

Every major corporation in America tries to bring in a diversity of voices and faces to represent a variety of viewpoints and represent its client base better. The Bulls don’t, because they treat themselves like a small family business consisting of friends of the family.

Look at the Bulls’ war room prior to the Butler trade. There are no women, no people of color, no staff that they aren’t already supremely comfortable with. They’ve created a massive echo chamber where they refuse to take accountability for their poor decisions. The Rose injury is another popular excuse that the Bulls go back to time and again, but it has absolutely no bearing on their recent missteps.

If the Bulls really want to “change the narrative,” they can. They don’t have to appear on talk radio. They don’t have to repeat hollow talking points to the media. The only thing that they should focus on is getting their basketball decisions right.

They can start by nailing draft picks. Lauri Markkanen is looking like he might make them look good already after a promising Eurobasket tournament.

They also need to spend some money. They should actively pursue acquiring bad assets for future picks. Trading for Quincy Pondexter and a second-round pick was a good start, but they need to do much more and eat up the rest of their open space. They also must spend more in boosting their staff. Their moves to hire more G-League staff and a player development guy in Shawn Respert was a step in the right direction, but they need to go further.

The Bulls are not a piñata that hangs motionless until its inevitable destruction. They can do something to control their own destiny with their decision-making process. If the health of the franchise improves, so too will the narrative.

(Top photo: AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski)