Sir Charles on the Bulls: 'Y'all In Trouble'

I don't really think I need to go any further into how I feel about the Bulls this season, as I've been expressing my opinions all season long. So instead I'll turn it over to Charles Barkley, who is by far the greatest analyst in any sport ever. I generally enjoy watching Charles in the TNT studio with Ernie Johnson and Kenny Smith more than the game that's being shown.

Charles did a conference call with Reggie Miller yesterday to talk about the upcoming NBA playoffs when the topic of the Bulls came up. As usual, Barkley didn't hold back.

"They have a bunch of good, little pieces, but they should have made trades," Barkley said. "Who is their best player? We start with that. Who is their best player? To be a great team in the NBA, you have to have at least one really good player. When you think about the Bulls, you don't even know who their best player is.

"When [Luol Deng and Ben Gordon] turn down $10 million to $12 million [per year], I'm like, 'Are you kidding me?' " he said. "First of all, that's highway robbery if you get that much money. They're just good players, not great players.

"If you offer a good player $10 million a year, he should get a pen as fast as he can."

Charles then finished with this salvo about the trades the Bulls never made.

"Whoever didn't make that trade was just stupid," he said. "Hey, Luol Deng is a good player but he's never going to be Pau Gasol and he's definitely never going to be Kevin Garnett. And now you're stuck. You're up the creek without a paddle, plain and simple."

He's 100% right, too. None of us can really say anything to the contrary about it either, because everybody I know was against trading Luol Deng at the time. The only way I wanted to see Deng traded in the last few years was for Kobe, and though I would have gotten over it if Deng had been sent to Minnesota for KG, I wasn't exactly thrilled with that idea at first either.

Of course, it's a lot easier for Charles or anyone to say this now, after we've all seen the disaster that ensued.