Dating back to 2000...

2000: 1st round, 4th pick overall, Marcus Fizer, PF, Iowa State
Could have taken: Mike Miller, G/F, Florida

2001: 1st round, 4th pick overall, Eddy Curry, C, Thornwood HS
Could have taken: Jason Richardson, SG, Michigan State; Joe Johnson, SG, Arkansas; Richard Jefferson, SF, Arizona
- Probably our worst draft day in history. We draft Curry, trade Elton Brand for Tyson Chandler, and pick Trenton Hassell right before the Warriors select one Gilbert Arenas from Arizona.

2002: 1st round, 2nd selection overall, Jay Williams, PG, Duke
Could have taken: Amare Stoudemire, PF, Cypress Creek HS; Caron Butler, SF, UConn

2003: 1st round, 7th pick overall, Kirk Hinrich, PG, Kansas
Could have taken: Mickael Pietrus, SG, France; T.J. Ford, PG, Texas; David West, PF, Xavier

2004: 1st round, 3rd pick overall, Ben Gordon, SG, UConn
Could have taken: Devin Harris, PG, Wisconsin; Josh Childress, SF, Stanford

2004: 1st round, 7th pick overall, Luol Deng, SF, Duke
Could have taken: Andre Igoudala, SF, Arizona; Al Jefferson, PF, Prentiss HS

2005: No Selections

2006: 1st round, 2nd pick overall, LaMarcus Aldridge, C, Texas (Traded for Tyrus Thomas)
Could have taken: Brandon Roy, SG, Washington; Rudy Gay, SF, UConn; Could have kept Aldridge

Gilbert Arenas - Joe Johnson - Rudy Gay - Amare Stoudemire - Al Jefferson
Devin Harris - Jason Richardson - Andre Igoudala - David West - LaMarcus Aldridge
Kirk Hinrich - Brandon Roy - Andre Igoudala - Elton Brand - Joakim Noah

Just some possibilities. Obviously, with these players impacting records and such, it might not have ever been possible to pick some of these players, but it shows just how much of a crap shoot the draft is.

Bulls 1st round selections since 2000:
Marcus Fizer
Jamal Crawford (acquired for Chris Mihm)
Dalibor Bagaric
Eddy Curry
Tyson Chandler (acquired for Elton Brand)
Jay Williams
Kirk Hinrich
Ben Gordon
Luol Deng (acquired from Phoenix)
Tyrus Thomas (acquired for LaMarcus Aldridge)
Thabo Sefolosha (acquired for Rodney Carney)
Joakim Noah

- Only 6/12 of those remain on the Bulls roster. 3 out of those 12 are out of the NBA. In this timeframe, 17 1st rounders made the NBA All-Star Game. Zero of those came from Bulls picks.

Personally the Roy Aldridge hurt the most for me. I always wanted Roy.

YOu know what really bothers me about these type of threads? I don't think there's a team in the league you can't do this for.

Like in 2002. Oh man, if only we'd had Amare. We should have predicted that Jay Williams would be an idiot and ruin his career right before they changed the NBA rules to a level that could have made him a dominant point guard. Or in 2004, we could have had those guys who turned out so much better than Gordon or Deng, or instead we could have selected Shaun Livingston and had him destroy his knee on our roster. Or we should somehow have seen what every other team in the bloody league missed on Gilbert Arenas, Michael Redd, and on and on.

I can live with talk about Roy/Aldridge/Thomas, because that's a situation we legit made for ourselves with that deal. But don't give me this "oh we should have known these guys would have been better than the ones we picked" otherwise. Don't you think there are 30 teams kicking themselves for missing Monta Ellis? Or that the Wizards wish they'd not given up on Ben Wallace before he turned in to a defensive monster?

If only the Bulls had somehow never made a mistake and had a time machine that allowed them to accurately predict the future of every move they made and managed to pick out every single steal in every draft, then we'd be so good...

I too hate this spiff. I'm sure Portland says "if only we'd taken Jordan instead of Bowie" too. Guess what? spiff happens... hindsight is 20-20.

There is no context behind this thread. It's just fun to look at. I don't understand why you're getting your panties in a bunch. I'm just saying, we don't have a great track record with 1st rounders since 2000, and we passed up on some guys who have turned out to be pretty damn good. It's for entertainment, quit being pissy.

Like I said, it just goes to show how big of a crap shoot the draft is.

My sorry Senior Slav.

If you're going to look at it that way, then I'd say the thing it illustrates is how badly the Curry Chandler draft and the Jay Williams accident screwed us.

Starting from the Curry/Chandler draft. After that, we have 2 young starting big men. So why do we need a 3rd, who reportedly has attitude problems and will also take some time to develop? So, we have no interest in Amare, and he drops several spots. You can't exactly play Curry, Chandler, and Stoudamire all at once.

We take Jay Williams, who like I said, has star written all over him. But within a year we're replacing him. So instead of being able to take a shooting guard with that #7 pick, like Pietrus, or a PF like West (same reason as before)...we have to take another PG. TJ Ford vs. Hinrich, well, on that I'm not sure.

2004...well, we've drafted a point guard, a C, and a PF over the last few years. What positions do we still need? SF and SG. We draft one of each. Still a damn good draft, turned in to a couple of playoff runs and a #3 and #7 out of a #3 and a #20.

2006...we drafted a SG 2 years beforehand? WHy should we draft Brandon Roy when we already have a 2 year shooting guard who's hopefully going to develop in to a 20+ a game player? We traded away Eddy Curry but still have Tyson Chandler (that draft was before we made the swap on him for Wallace and PJ Brown basically) so do we really want to draft Aldridge, who seems to be another C, or do we want more of a PF player like Tyrus?

Basically, I think you can draw a straight line from those 2002-2003 picks and their blowups to each of the drafts after them, with the Bulls trying to fill in the holes around those guys or the holes created when they blow up.

We got a raw deal in 2003. There wasn't many other options besides Hinrich. It was just really unfortunate that Jay Williams had to do what he did because I think he would have had a great career in the NBA. You can believe in the story that Paxson offered his pick plus Donyell Marshall for the Miami pick (That eventually became D-Wade) but Miami backed off at the last minute.

How's this lineup look...Curry, Chandler, D-Wade, Jay Williams, then ???

And thats where it all went downhill. We needed a big man who could score and we drafted him. Unfortunately, he's scoring 19 a game for the Blazers right now. Can we trade Tyrus to the Knicks now that they have D'Antoni for their 1st rounder? Maybe then we can actually draft a real PF who has some sort of skill-set or something?

Was this a joke?!?

Actually, it was Donyell and the 7th pick to Toronto for the 4th pick (which would be used on DWade). There was also talk that had Jay Williams not gotten hurt, he was on his way out as well. JWill had attitude issues in Paxson's eyes and thus needed to be moved (Pax was the radio/tv commentator during JWill's rookie season). At the time, Paxson was going to try to run with DWade and Crawford at the guard spots. If he could have traded JWill to get a decent big (I think the thought was Camby), then he would not have hesitated on the Toronto deal. The holdup was losing Donyell and having no real experience up front. So he stayed conservative in true Pax fashion and went with the Hinrich pick to replace the injured JWill.

So JWill screwed us big time in what he would have allowed us to do in terms of trading him...and not in terms of how well he would have played with us.

Crawford - Wade - Rose - Chandler - Camby would have been pretty decent.

where "we suck" happens. lol

Ha. Glad you like it.

JWill screwed us big time b/c he was going to be a sick NBA player. Not b/c we couldn't trade him. I highly doubt we would have given up on JWill during his rookie contract. He had the potential to be a top 5 scoring PG and he was a decent passer.

Ahhh...but we were. Go look up any archived articles from around the time of his injury.