So Ben Gordon is off to Detroit, and my views on the matter are frankly much closer to those of the Bulls bloggers who think it’s for the best than those of the folks who, well, really really don’t.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: Gordon is an absolutely terrific player, and ranks up there with the best pure shooters I’ve ever had the privilege to watch. (I also had the privilege of sitting in the stands in Madison Square Garden as his UConn team knocked my Irish out of the Big East Tourney in 2004, but that’s another story.) He downright carried the Bulls through long stretches of his career, and without his one-man circus act outside the three-point arc the Bulls likely wouldn’t have taken the Celtics past Game Five in last year’s playoffs. He is also, however, a clear sixth man who wants to be a starter, a huge defensive liability on a team that’s already got far too many of those, and a massive financial commitment to take on a year before Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade, Amar’e Stoudemire, and others all hit the free agent market. Will the Bulls look foolish if they end up whiffing altogether in the Great Free Agent Summer of 2010? Absolutely, but they’d also have looked foolish if they broke the bank retaining a guy who can’t be more than the third-best player on a championship team, and so left themselves without a chance to acquire the sort of consistent scorer-cum-defensive stopper that they so badly need. Maybe none of this would have been an issue if the Bulls had prioritized Gordon over Luol Deng and refused to invest so much money in Kirk Hinrich, but nobody could have known that Deng would come up so flat in 2008, let alone that a potentially era-defining point guard was going to fall into Chicago’s lap.

Looking ahead to next season, it’s obviously going to be a tough run. If Deng returns to anything like his 2007 form, John Salmons plays like he did down the stretch of 2008, and Derrick Rose, Tyrus Thomas, and Joakim Noah continue to show improvement, then with a core seven made up of those guys together with Hinrich and Brad Miller, as well as – one hopes! – some solid contributions from James Johnson and Taj Gibson, the Bulls have clearly got the talent to push for the fourth or fifth seed in the playoffs next year and make Chicago look like an attractive location for free agents with an interest in winning. That’s quite a lot of “if”s, of course: by my lights the steady improvement from Rose and Noah are the only givens on that list, and it’s still incumbent on Vinny Del Negro to show that he can be a capable NBA coach. But if what the Bulls management is looking for is the best chance to bring a title back to Chicago, the 55-plus million they’d have needed to invest in Ben Gordon is probably best kept in the bank.

I’ll look back on Gordon’s years with the Bulls very, very fondly, but unfortunately this is how these things sometimes have to work.

(Image via Flickr user Keith Allison.)

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