With news hitting on Tuesday that the Chicago Bulls are preparing to decline to match Houston's contract offer to restricted free agent Omer Asik, the team's miserable offseason is just about complete. They've done absolutely everything right, in a very real sense, and everything miserably. The Chicago Bulls will finally pay the luxury tax, in 2012-13, so that the team will be able to point and yell "SEE?!?" when you call the organization's ownership group cheap. They've dismantled the core — and, make no mistake, this is THE CORE — of the team that put together the league's best record from 2010 through last April with enough caveats and excuses in place to completely get away with it. This is what they always do. Spend enough to skirt complete and total criticism. Leave enough not entirely unreasonable influences and timing issues to help you understand. Leave it so the moves in a vacuum — taking apart that bench just to save money — that seem so abhorrent are easily argued with a nice pull quote from a team employee or sound bite in a call in radio show from the team's owner. You don't need to be an NBA junkie to shake your head at the team's moves, but the Bulls' front office makes it so you don't need to be an NBA salary capologist to understand their impetus behind those moves. The fair-weather fan can be persuaded away from his anger in a manner of minutes, or space of two paragraphs. They're clever, those Bulls. And they're going to be gone for a few years.

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