Here is the snippet for the Bulls:

2. Chicago Bulls (48-18)

Provided they can keep up last season's intensity through a sausage-grinder of a schedule, the Bulls are very likely the second-best team in basketball. Chicago led the NBA in defensive efficiency last season, thanks in equal parts to Tom Thibodeau's help-heavy schemes and a long, athletic rotation that defended the rim with gusto.

While the Bulls won a league-best 62 games, they finished just 12th in offensive efficiency and were shut down by Miami in the playoffs. This explains their quest to add more scoring. Chicago waived Keith Bogans and signed Richard Hamilton to provide scoring help for Derrick Rose; I'd argue Hamilton can help the Bulls' anemic second unit even more, depending on how they spot his minutes. Unfortunately, he's also higher-maintenance than Bogans, so the Bulls will need to manage that carefully to maintain the esprit de corps that fueled them through last season.

Aside from Rip, the big item in the Bulls' favor is continuity -- Chicago has the most intact roster this side of Philly, with Hamilton the only change. Several young players likely will improve, including Joakim Noah and reserve bigs Omer Asik and Taj Gibson. The latter combo presents an awesome defensive frontcourt with the second unit, but each is raw offensively. Rose comes off an MVP season, but the exciting part is that he's still getting better -- his free throw rate steadily escalated during 2010-11, while his long-range shooting and court vision are the next items on the list.

While continuity favors the Bulls, the schedule presents some challenges. Chicago is generally a deep team, but Thibodeau's instincts last season were to ride Rose and Luol Deng as long as humanly possible; do that with this season's schedule, and he'll break them. If he treads more carefully, the Bulls are heavy favorites to get back to the conference finals.

Posted because it has some relevancy. Depending on the new CBA, we may or may not be able to find solution for our SG problems through free agency. For those without Insider, some of the possibly available free agent SGs that are listed are:

Mickael Pietrus (PO)
Rodney Stuckey (Restricted)
Wilson Chandler (Restricted)
Nick Young (Restricted)
Arron Afflalo (Restricted)
Marcus Thorton (Restricted)
Jason Richardson (Unrestricted)
Jamal Crawford (Unrestricted)

Best Defender: Omer Asik, Bulls

Part of the reason why Asik gets the nod is the lack of good defense being played overall by this class. But he's deserving as well, thanks to his attentiveness to scouting reports and his willingness to move his feet and contest every shot.

He does jump a bit too much for the shot block, costing him valuable rebounding position, but for the most part he's an excellent pick-and-roll defender and a tough guy to score on inside.

Hollinger talks about why the Spurs won't reach 72 wins. For those without Insider, Chicago is projected to go 32 and 18 the rest of the year and finish fourth in the East.

MJ's "Flu Game" is number one. Insider needed after the top ten. Not suprisingly, MJ has 4 of the top ten performances and 11 overall. Sheesh.

For the non-Insiders:

3. Bulls-Spurs

Chicago gets: Matt Bonner, Roger Mason, Michael Finley, draft rights to Tiago Splitter

San Antonio gets: John Salmons, Tyrus Thomas

Would Chicago do it?
On the surface, it might seem that the Bulls would get killed in this deal because the Spurs would be getting the two best players in the trade.

But the Bulls have good reason to move Salmons and Thomas, neither of whom is in the team's long-term plans: The Bulls want the cap space such a trade would provide. Chicago can set itself up to be a serious player in free agency this summer, given the appeal of the market and the foundation of Derrick Rose, Luol Deng and Joakim Noah.

Bonner and Mason, who have expiring contracts, could contribute this season, and Splitter is a good prospect who could come in and help the Bulls in the middle at some point or become a trade asset. As a former first-round draft pick who has established himself in Europe, he might fit the bill if the Bulls are looking to get talent and/or picks in return for Thomas.

And then, if they can pull off trade No. 4 (see below), the Bulls could be in great position going into the summer shopping season. Chicago could be an attractive destination for the likes of James, Wade and Bosh or, at worst, players like Joe Johnson and David Lee.

Would San Antonio do it?
Maybe. The team needs immediate help, as they get older and fall behind the rest of the West. Both Salmons and Thomas would give the Spurs some younger legs, with Salmons also providing offensive punch and Thomas some defense and rebounding.

Thomas' problems in getting along with his coaches have been well-documented, but perhaps he would respond better to a coach like Gregg Popovich and a veteran team led by Tim Duncan. If so, Thomas could become a huge asset to the Spurs over the long haul.

The Spurs rarely make trades like this, but I can't think of a better one for them right now.

4. Lakers-Bulls

Chicago gets: Jordan Farmar, Adam Morrison, Josh Powell

Los Angeles gets: Kirk Hinrich

Would the Bulls do it?
John Paxson has been reluctant to give away Hinrich even though he's been in a funk since Derrick Rose arrived. But the time to move him is now. The team would be much better off next summer with the extra cap space, and Farmar would be a serviceable back-up for Rose in the meantime.

If Chicago could pull off this trade and the one above, it would be very much in the running for the top free agents this summer, with perhaps only Miami as well-positioned to enter the market.

Would Los Angeles do it?
Derek Fisher is struggling, Farmar hasn't progressed as the Lakers hoped, and Shannon Brown isn't really a point guard. So the Lakers need an upgrade at point guard and they don't have a lot of good options.

Hinrich might not be ideal, given his protracted offensive slump and sizable contract, but he is a smart player who should be a good fit in the triangle, and he can defend. And who else could the Lakers get? Look around the league and you'll see there doesn't appear to be a good trade partner for the Lakers other than Chicago. The other available point guards -- including Luke Ridnour, Chris Duhon, Ramon Sessions and T.J. Ford -- wouldn't fit as well as Hinrich.

The major concern about Hinrich appears to be the additional two years and $17 million on his contract after this season, which is a lot for a tax-paying team to take on. But are the Lakers really that strapped for cash? Even with the largest payroll in the league, they're still turning a profit.

For all of those who want Iverson.

The Bulls are number 7 on the list. No real revelations here, we have good young players, attractive market, and salary cap flexibility, but the managemnt sucks. Since the article is for Insiders only, here is the Bulls info:

7. Chicago Bulls | Future Power Rating: 609

PLAYERS MANAGEMENT MONEY MARKET DRAFT
256 (7th) 104 (13th) 130 (4th) 68 (6th) 51 (15th)

A dozen seasons after their most recent title, the Bulls and their fans are still suffering withdrawal pains from the Michael Jordan era. While the team has played the role of playoff spoiler two out of the past three years, Bulls fans yearn for more. And according to our assessment, they have a reason to -- pardon the pun -- be bullish.

The Bulls have a lot of young talent, headlined by Derrick Rose -- the 21-year-old point guard has the potential to be the league MVP someday and figured heavily into the Bulls ranking seventh in the players category. Rose will have support from Luol Deng, Joakim Noah and, if he sticks around, Tyrus Thomas.

Even more encouraging should be the Bulls' top-six rankings in the money and market categories. We project the Bulls to have max or near-max salary-cap room in 2010. Given the desirability of the city, the glamour of the franchise (thanks, MJ) and the opportunity to play with a superstar point guard, we think they're likely to land another star to run alongside Rose.

So what's holding the Bulls back from an even higher overall ranking? We have questions about them in the management category, starting with heavy-handed owner Jerry Reinsdorf and extending down to new GM Gar Forman and neophyte head coach Vinny Del Negro. The Bulls over the years have seemed paralyzed at key moments: They hesitated in hiring Mike D'Antoni and ended up with Del Negro, and they've passed on several great opportunities to land a post player while overvaluing and showing great reluctance to trade their young players.

So while the Bulls, on paper, have the potential to become contenders with some shrewd moves, their track record of the past few seasons means we have our reservations about their ability to actually pull it off.

Joakim and Kirk make the list.

The Bulls are 13th. About where I expected.

I guess it's positive that a Bull made the list.

And that guy is crusty veteran guard Lindsey Hunter, who (if he continues to play) is considered a one-man, full-court press.

[From the FanShots. Can't get further into it today, but this does bring up an interesting discussion as to what the real expectations are to this season. Would a 'sleeper' success be 45 wins? Or should that be expected? -ed.]

Those aren't the only imperative questions for Chicago. Even if we conclude that they came of age in April, is it fair to expect them to continue their progress without their top scorer, Ben Gordon, whom they lost to Detroit?

Short answer: Yes.

D-Rose is number one.

The NBA dropped an absolute bombshell last month, and I'm still not sure everyone realizes how big it was.
So it's time for me to get the blinking neon lights and huge capital letters.

As our Marc Stein mentioned a month ago, way down of the last paragraph in the league's memo to teams on the salary cap was the little nugget that the league projects the 2010-11 salary cap will shrink sharply thanks to revenue decline projected for this coming season.

That's only the tip of the iceberg. The big news is that it takes the luxury-tax level down with it. Teams are looking at a tax level of between $61-65 million next season. While some farsighted teams had been projecting such a state of affairs for a while, I'm told that as recently as April the guidance from the league was much more optimistic.

This is huge. People in every front office in the league has been talking about it, especially the ones that were caught off guard. Most of the good ones weren't, it should be said; teams whose bean-counters follow the revenue side closely were projecting a decline in the salary cap for a long time, as I noted at the end of this story in February. (Incidentally, this is one of many reasons I don't believe Billy Hunter's bluster -- some very smart people in front offices around the league were planning for this scenario several months ago.)

For fans the issue is the cap, because that's where all the yummy free-agent stuff will happen, especially the projected circus surrounding LeBron James. And we'll get to how it impacts next summer in a minute.

WHICH TEAMS HAVE CAP SPACE?

On Friday, Chad Ford will break down the 2010 salary cap situation and explain which nine teams could be in position to sign likely free agents such as LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

But for teams the big story is the tax, and fans should care too since it's going to impact a massive number of personnel decisions over the next 18 months. In fact, it's already had a huge effect this summer.

Allow me to explain. The entire guiding principle of most cap-related decisions in the past two decades is that the cap will almost always go up and sure as heck won't go down. It's embedded in the contracts, too, most of which contain either 8 percent or 10.5 percent annual raises. Thus teams feel safe gambling on a $5 million player. If they're wrong, the cap will effectively erase the mistake in a season or two by continually rising.

In the current environment, however, some teams are going to be completely whipsawed by a cap that goes down just as their salaries go up. Clubs that have several players with long-term deals could be well under the tax threshold in 2009-10, and then be well over it in 2010-11 with more or less the same players. This is a real threat for the Philadelphia 76ers and Indiana in particular, and it could grab several other teams depending on what transpires in the coming months.

Those two clubs aren't in the worst situations, however. The New Orleans Hornets is not only over this season's tax line; they're also several million above next season's projected threshold even if they cut Hilton Armstrong and Julian Wright. Or how about Denver? The Nuggets' starting five makes them a tax team even in the league's most optimistic scenario, at $66 million, and that's before adding Chris Andersen, Ty Lawson and at least six other players to the payroll.

Wait, there's more. The Charlotte Bobcats and Golden State Warriors are close enough to the tax that signing a player to the midlevel exception this summer would put them over next season, even if they don't use their draft picks a year from now. Now you understand why each has been so quiet this offseason. And wonder of wonders, even cheapo Memphis could threaten the tax line if the Griz get a high lottery pick and drop another $10 million or so to keep Rudy Gay.

That doesn't include the usual high-spending teams that are likely to go far past the tax threshold. The Lakers are looking at a $25 million tax bill even after holding the line on contracts for Trevor Ariza and Lamar Odom, while the Orlando Magic is looking at nearly as large an assessment without nearly the same revenue streams. The Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks also will be way over if they hope to keep some semblance of their current rosters together, and San Antonio may join them if it wants to keep free-agent-to-be Manu Ginobili.

This was liable to happen at some point, of course; the cap wasn't going to keep going up forever. Nonetheless, teams that were caught holding the wrong cards at the wrong time feel burned, especially because the guidance didn't come until well after most of the contracts had been agreed to.
Essentially, the horse has already left the barn.

"We felt we were conservative," one such team exec told me when the league's memo came out, "[but] you're shooting in the dark."

So why we are we talking so much about the luxury-tax bill for two years from now? Because the repercussions already are being felt, and will be throughout the league until the 2011 trade deadline.

Take Philadelphia, for instance. The Sixers were at next season's projected tax line even without re-signing Andre Miller, and that doesn't account for a draft pick next year, either. Now you understand why they showed amazingly little enthusiasm for re-signing one of their best players. I'm told Miller entered free agency looking for a $40 million deal, but with cap space tight and his own team sitting things out he had to settle for a third of that.

Miller isn't the only one whose situation changed because of the plummeting tax line. Linas Kleiza of Denver, Ramon Sessions of Milwaukee and Raymond Felton of Charlotte are nominally restricted free agents, but given their team's tax situations it's hard to imagine any of the three getting market-rate offers from their current employers. Jarrett Jack was in the same situation before Toronto came to his rescue.

In addition to the teams I mentioned above, several other clubs are going to have to tread very carefully to avoid the tax line next season, including second-tier contenders like Atlanta, Toronto, Detroit, Portland and Washington.

And now that the A-list free agents are off the board, we're seeing the chilling impact it's had on signings. A lot of people are blaming the economy, and while that's been important in restricting the spending of a couple of teams (Sacramento and New Jersey most prominently), it's the tax that's been the much larger issue.

For instance, the threat of a tax hit a year from now is why several productive unrestricted free agents (such as Drew Gooden, Hakim Warrick and Rasho Nesterovic) had to settle for one-year deals that paid them reasonably this season but wouldn't impact their new clubs' tax number for the crucial 2010-11 season. And it's why several others (such as Allen Iverson, Flip Murray and Joe Smith) still don't have a uniform for next season.

Younger players looking for multiyear deals have been burned even worse than the vets. Quality restricted free agents such as David Lee, Nate Robinson, Glen Davis and the trio mentioned above don't have deals for next season and don't seem particularly close to signing one, even though they're widely acknowledged to be desirable assets. It's why Josh Childress is back in Greece and Carlos Delfino might be going back to Russia.

Of course, anything that creates losers also creates winners. Those teams that are under the cap this season and next basically won the lottery, because teams such as New Orleans, Utah and Philadelphia will clamor for the privilege of dumping a contract on them.

The biggest winner of all, however, might be Miami. While several teams' hopes of cap space were severely diminished by the projected salary cap dip -- most notably New York's sugarplum dreams of inking two max contracts at once -- the Heat are unaffected. They have virtually no money on the books beyond this season and could add one max contract and another fairly expensive star, all while keeping Dwyane Wade.

No wonder the Miami Heat have been quiet this summer and happily let Jamario Moon scoot off to Cleveland. For all the talk from Wade about threatening to bolt if the Heat aren't better this year, it's clear Miami's best shot at contending is to try to find Wade two stellar teammates next season and then continue to build in the following seasons … when the cap and tax levels project to rise just like the good old days.

Unfortunately, for most of the league's 30 teams, the bombshell in that 10th paragraph was far more unsettling. Fans already are weary of hearing about the luxury tax in trade conversations, but in the coming 12 months they're going to hear more of it than they ever imagined.

No surprise here, Chicago gets a D.

VDN is on the list.

Nothing special, but I thought I would post it up anyway.

Not sure what two spots that late in the draft gives them, but moving up is still moving up.

Pretty good read.

[From the FanShots. Some weird answers (this team could use Noc?) but it's really a question about Rose: If he's a rising power the Bulls are a rising power. -ed]

Not sure what I think about these statments. I agree with some of them.

[From the Fanshots. Fun and feel-good read. Though with an ominous sign: Simmons mentions he's waiting for Tim Thomas to 'infect' the Bulls the same day Vinny says he will use TiT more. -ed.]

I cringe everytime someone compares Rose to Steve Francis. Francis was/is a selfish primodonna, Rose is not.

Rose wins Mid-season MVP. No suprise. But look at 6th man of the year, he has BG as an honorable mention. BG has started 35 out of 42 gamed this year. Just shows you how much basketball these media people actually watch.

I actually agreed with most of what he said about Rose.

About half way down the article. He says that BG is a high volume/low percentage shooter. Really? BG's shooting numbers match up well with another UCONN alum.

Ben Gordon
Career-FG 43% 3pt 41% 18.2 PPG 3pt Atts. 1603 part way thru 5th season.

Ray Allen thru first 5 seasons
FG 44% 3pt 39% 18.8 PPG 3pt Atts. 1748
Career
FG 44% 3pt 39% 21 PPG

Imagine if BG had the help of someone like Cassel, Glenn Robinson and Vin Baker early in his career.