The biggest story of the NBA draft night was perhaps the deal that didn’t work out. All night long we were bombarded with reports that the Bulls were actively engaged in talks with the Timberwolves for the number five pick. A deal wasn’t made prior to the pick, so then the reports became specifically about Butler going to Minnesota for the draft rights to Providence’s Kris Dunn, as well as Ricky Rubio. In a shocking twist, the Wolves actually reportedly told the Bulls no because they wanted Zach LaVine instead of Rubio. LaVine is young and athletic but there hasn’t been much else to say about him so it’s somewhat crazy they would rather keep him than have added Butler. Since the deal didn’t work out, now the Bulls are completely denying there was any talks to begin with.
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Draft night is all about leaked information, sometimes on purpose, tactics and maneuver’s to try and get over on your opponents that you are currently battling to build your team up better than them. Is it possible there were no real talks between the Bulls & Wolves? Sure but not likely to be the truth at all. In fact, odds are the truth was what we were hearing all night from experts like Adrian Wojnarowski. With that said, Bulls GM, Gar Forman did his best to save face and make it seem like they are fully dedicated to Butler now.
“During the draft, we started getting some texts and saw something on TV that we were in heated talks with somebody, I don’t know what it was saying,” Forman said. “We were in no talks with anybody. There was no discussion during the entire draft this evening as far as Jimmy Butler was concerned.
“We have never made a call in regards to Jimmy Butler. We’ve talked about, we value Jimmy Butler, we’re very happy to have Jimmy Butler. We’ve got a phenomenal basketball player who was an All-Star and All-NBA defender, is still young, obviously we’ve got him under contract long-term, those are all positive. He, again, is what we want to be. We’ve said this all along. We like Jimmy Butler, we did not shop Jimmy Butler. Did we receive calls? Of course we did, and that’s our job to listen to calls. We get calls on a lot of our players and that’s stuff that happens all throughout the league.”
Had they have traded Butler, the Bulls would have gone into rebuilding mode and probably been lousy for a few years, so it’s probably best for them that nothing happened. There is no denying it though that former Bulls coach, Tom Thibodeau, who currently is the coach of the Wolves, knew exactly what he was trying to do.
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