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law Everybody talked about it since I first moved to Oregon. The big one, the earthquake that trashed the whole West Coast. Total destruction. Officially calling it the largest natural disaster in American history. I just didn't know what would help me next. So I took it all. Even the gun. It was time cello see why American Afterlife is the number one fiction and drama podcast in America presented by Pair of Thieves. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Available now. Dan Bernstein Unfiltered Unfiltered on 312 Sports DBU on 312 is brought to you in partnership with my bookie and today by Aura Frames a u r a frames.com promo code DBU for $25 off their best selling Carver Matte Frame so we finished up yesterday and then my phone buzzes and I look down, I see the Bulls have hired a guy. I'm like, okay, well, that's what we expected, that all the reporting was leading everybody to follow the trail of breadcrumbs back to the comfortable and the familiar and the reinstatement of former Chicago Bull employee Matt Lloyd as the new head of the organization. And then record scratch and oh, okay then. All right. Bryson Graham is a is going to be running the Chicago Bulls, the side of the Bulls that we care about. Bryson Graham is going to be running it. He's 39 years old. He came up through the Pelicans and the Hawks and is a former player. He is known for his scouting work. He's known for identifying and developing talent. And this is a major, major leap of faith for Michael Reinsdorf and the Chicago Bulls. And to me, that's the story for all of us who defaulted to the idea of them choosing the path of least resistance. We were all surprised. And that's great. I am so happy to be surprised. I'm so happy to have to begin to get to know Bryson Graham and start making calls about this young man and his vision and how he sees The Bulls organization's place in wherever the NBA is next. What can he see? This is a huge first press conference for whenever they schedule it. This is because we don't always, we've never met this guy before. And if you want to check out the, the first blush organizations win championships that Jason and I did yesterday, just sort of getting the news, making sure that we're coached up enough to get out and talk about him a little bit. We're not even going to really get into the coaching aspect right now because there's so many bigger organizational issues that we, it remains to be seen what kind of power and what kind of resources Bryson Graham is going to have because when you are young and hungry, you, you don't have your pick of jobs. And unfortunately when the Bulls decided at the beginning, when, when they, they kind of half assed this and said, oh well, we're getting rid of everybody except we're keeping the coach. And you got to like working with a coach. And that was something they did wrong. And I think it took Billy Donovan to recognize it and tell him that they did it wrong, but that eventually the right thing ended up happening only because Billy was wise enough to understand that this was untenable. You can't do what Michael Reinsdorf did. But I think they recovered from that initial screw up. I think they recovered from it by deciding on a clean break, by deciding to do something scary for them, for John Paxton to not. You spent a career, you spent a decade molding Matt Lloyd into what could be this viable middle aged head of an organization. And that would be a massive victory personally, for John Paxson to say, we spent all this time developing this kid that we plucked out of the comms department and taught him how to do all this and gave him every opportunity, gave him increased responsibility, let him, let him leave the nest and go to another organization and become general manager of a successful organization. And now to cap that all off, we are bringing him back and they didn't do it. That's something to be celebrated because that tells me a couple of things as I'm understanding the process. Even if the expectation was that Matt Lloyd would end up winning this, he didn't. And it tells me that the fact that they would allow themselves to be that impressed by someone else to be completely objective and fair in their assessment of the candidates, I don't know if the guy's going to succeed or fail. Please, like don't get ahead of yourself and say, well, you like this. Hire you like, I like the ak Higher. I liked it because of the idea behind it. Go, go to the successful organization, go outside the organization. Everything I liked about that. Then they got, they hired two guys out of it and they bring in Mark Eversley. And now that I think about it, I would like to know more about that hire. And that's why as I started thinking and I was sort of disabused of this notion as we were discussing yesterday in owc because I still think they need, they need a high ranking nerd in this organization and I use that term lovingly, but they need a quant guy, they need an economics major, they need somebody who is really well versed in that side of the organization as a trusted lieutenant to a player side guy. And I would want the counterbalance moving conversely as well that if this, if they did have a number side guy, I would definitely want it counterbalanced by a scouting side guy. It's just the way it works in a, in a healthy front office right now. But they're going to let him if he wants, if Bryson Graham recognizes that and wants that, he will make that higher. There isn't going to be anything that is, that is forced down. So I do think that they might have learned the lesson from the misstep on Donovan to say if we're going to, let's. Here you go. You are in charge of Bulls basketball as we mentioned. What do you need? What do you need to make this work? Who and what that means? That entire slate of assistant coaches, your front bench, your back bench could be all gone. Head coach, all those guys, I don't want you hand picking your guys. Who are you're going to have on your coach's bench and you have, well, he works for him and he spies for him and if he's around the weight room, he say that's out, that's done, that's over and no more ownership ambassador guys who are there sticking their nose and stuff like Randy Brown used to do. None of that. You don't. This is your basketball side belongs to Bryson Graham and if he fails, you fire him. But you give him your rubric for success and you give him everything he needs to accomplish his vision. And I'll tell you what gets really frustrating are the number of times when you root for various teams when you keep being told your team is somehow behind the times. And I don't want to globalize this too much, but I know that it happened for years with the Bears and it happened for years with this understanding. Well, you know, they can hire all These people. But they gotta, they really have to do what other teams do when it comes to building up their infrastructure and spending money and having scouts everywhere. They need to have scouts and having enough people doing these jobs. And then you still hear it about the White Sox. Well, I mean anytime they want to actually do the business that other teams or their competitors do, they just, they don't seem to want to. They've got one guy that they call their analytics department and Gary Reinsdorf doesn't really believe in anything but old fashioned scouting and grit and gumption and everybody being David Eckstein and Eddie Stankey. But someday they'll modernize and do things the way other teams do. Just it gets wearying it over time. Then and now you hear that, well, maybe the Bulls will finally staff up. The Bulls will finally approach the business in the same way. And the creature comforts and everything you've got to have to make players happy in your organ. A complete and total overhaul of the medical side. And that is something that Bryson Graham has to talk to, it has to address. And I, and I hope he's asked about it. I would ask him about this at the press conference because if you really want the truth about one of the huge headwinds for the Bulls right now, it's their, it's their reputation medically, which around the league is awful. And I'm not going to point fingers because that doesn't matter. What matters is the perception around the league. Not what I think, not what you think, but what I know players think. Can I trust this organization with managing my health, with getting me back from injury, from understanding and diagnosing what's wrong and working back what's wrong. The Bulls have to fix that and they've got to fix it with, with something. It doesn't necessarily have to be just for splash, but they've got to make it clear to the league that they know their reputation, that they know that the players talk. Players are billion dollar individual corporations. Now this is major business and you can have all this salary cap space, but if you got a bad reputation around the league that needs fumigation, somehow fix that. The other thing I want them to do is reimagine the entire organizational relationship with their developmental mechanism. And that means whatever is going on with the Windy City Bulls, whatever the point was, and Billy Donovan III Ads as of right now is the head coach of the Windy City Bulls. So I don't know if he's staying. Is he going? Because everything should be open. Graham should be able to walk in here and said and be able to say this entire staff is. You'll have to re interview for your jobs. You have to put everybody on the street. But you can say right now that my basketball people coming in are free to do whatever they want in staffing these positions. If we retain scouts, we retain them, and if we don't, we don't. But we got to do this fast because we got a draft coming up and we can use the reports that we have in here that all this work has been done. And that's part of the problem right now, too. Making this change when you did is all of this work for this draft to this point has been done by AK's regime. So you, you can say these. This is a huge year. Yeah, it is. It is huge to have these top picks. We'll know more Sunday about exactly where these picks are and do they jump up? Do they not? But man, that, that. I don't know what you can do retroactively of how you can go through the scouting reports or whether or not you're hiring enough scouts from enough different teams who can then overlay and apply and, and rework your board. But the board's pretty done and it wasn't done by Bryson Graham's people. He doesn't even have a staff yet. His front office doesn't exist yet. So they need. You can't have the ghost of the previous regime having too big a say in this incredibly significant upcoming draft. It's easy for the Bulls to be like, oh yeah, the board's done. By whom is now that you're. You're doing this here, it's May 5th, Cinco de Mayo in Felice. Cinco de Mayo. It is not Mexican Independence Day, by the way. Cinco de Mayo, just so you know. And it's probably already cliche to mention what it is and what it isn't, I'm sure. But have the new people have strong thoughts about who you're drafting and what's going on and who's of value and who's not. Because everything is in play. Everything. Everybody at every level of your organization, everybody that you have beaten the Bushes going to high school games in Slovenia or high school games in China or the Academy games elsewhere in some of these other countries where there's 12 year olds and 13 year olds playing, you have to find out if you're doing it right. And if you're not, you have to start to do it right. And then you can talk about who you want as a coach not to Mention, are you looking at, are you going to hire the coach now who you believe will be leading you, your eventual championship team, or are you hiring a developmental coach now? Is this a point A to point B, where you need a certain kind of coach for where your team is right now because of how you expect to shape this roster? Or do you say, look, we're going to hire this guy and hope he grows into the job, and then we'll find out later if he can manage a team that's ready to go win a title? There used to be a concept of point A to point B, point B to point C, because the Bulls did it. The Bulls did it when they fired Doug Collins in the summer of 1989, that Doug Collins manic energy was what they needed. Now I also think that they fired him just because he was fighting with Michael too much. And there were some other things going on where Doug was a bit of too live a wire maybe at that time in his career. And it was very energetic, and you got the upsides of the energy and you got the downsides of the energy. And they needed somebody who was a little bit calmer. And Phil was that guy. And it allowed Michael to assume more power in how he shaped the team. We didn't talk about it in the same terms that we do now about players, coach and player empowerment, but there was some of that that Phil knew. Phil. Phil is much more comfortable allowing players to take up certain spaces. And he knew where to exist and how to exist in a different way for a team. And it worked. And they won multiple championships and everything was awesome. But it's to. To have that kind of vision now and say, hey, we're going to bring this coach and he's going to be perfect for the first three years, and then we're going to move on to this kind of coach. I think that may be presuming a bit too much that you should just hire the right person and hope that person is ready to grow into the job and. Or look at how you build out a staff, because there are some people who were head coaches that could really contribute on a bench while not necessarily being a head coach. And man, all the names that are out there right now, I can't wait to do these shows. But if you could tell me that you have Steve Kerr as your Phil Jackson, like, executive coach, but you. Who. Who's it, who's over here who never leaves the film room? He's pasty, he's pale. All he does is sit and scream at a Screen as he watches tape. And there's Tom Thibodeau. And Tom Thibodeau emerges with your defensive game plan. And Tom Thibodeau stands over there on the bench and screams at the defense. And he moves his hand in that strange way as if he has a joystick that's controlling where the players are supposed to go. Watch him sometime. Sit behind him at a game and watch that hand. And it looks like he's literally trying to joystick the players around. Is that your. Is that. You know, go ahead. You got all the money. You can spend whatever you want. You bring in five head coaches and give them all different responsibilities and have Stan Van Gundy over here. Apparently. I'm still waiting. Got a listener who said that he sent me a Stan Van Gundy body pillow. Now, I don't know if he's kidding, because supposedly it's here in the building. It just hasn't been sent up yet. We got. Our office manager is trying to track it down. But if we find it, you will see it on this camera. You will. If it's. If it is genuinely here, trust me, you are going to see it.