I have been watching the Chicago Bulls play basketball since before some of you were born. I have watched them win six championships. I have watched them miss the playoffs. I have watched them rebuild, re-rebuild, and at least once do something that I can only describe as un-building — that is, taking a team that was functioning and methodically disassembling it until the parts were scattered across the Eastern Conference in exchange for draft picks that, best I can tell, have yet to appear. I have seen a lot.

I did not expect to see 157 points.

The Philadelphia 76ers scored 157 points against the Chicago Bulls on Friday night. The Bulls scored 137. I want you to sit with that for a moment. A team that loses by 20 points typically has a bad night. A team that allows 157 points has experienced something categorically different. That is not a basketball score. That is a score you see when two people are playing H-O-R-S-E in a driveway and one of them doesn’t have the heart to stop.

I should tell you that I didn’t watch the whole game. I want to be honest with you. I turned it off somewhere in the third quarter when the deficit hit 25 and I decided my time would be better spent looking at the wall. The wall, for reference, was not doing anything. I preferred it.

Back when this franchise had Scottie Pippen operating as a secondary option and Michael Jordan was — well, you know what Michael Jordan was doing — we scored 157 points on people. We did not give up 157 points. There was a conception in this city that defense was something the Bulls did on purpose, not something that happened to other teams by accident. I understand that was a different era. I understand the game has changed. The three-point line is different now, the pace is different, players today have different training and nutrition and analytics and whatever else they do. I get it. I’m not an idiot.

But 157, people.

The Bulls are currently 29 and 44, which puts them in a race with the Milwaukee Bucks for draft lottery positioning that the organization’s front office has taken to describing, in press materials, as “strategic optimization.” Let me translate that for you: they are trying to lose. Or at least, they are not trying especially hard to win. The official line is that this is smart, that it positions the team for future success, that a high lottery pick in a strong draft class is worth more than a few wins in a season already lost. I have heard this argument. It is a reasonable argument.

It would be a more convincing argument if the team didn’t appear to be discovering, in real time, that defense is a thing that needs to happen.

A friend of mine — I won’t use his name because he would be embarrassed — sent me a text during the third quarter that said “at least they’re not boring.” I thought about that for a long time. He’s right, technically. Watching a basketball team give up 157 points is not boring. It is many things. Boring is not one of them. But there’s a category of entertainment that I would describe as compelling in the same way that a kitchen fire is compelling, which is to say you cannot look away, and you are not glad it’s happening.

The Bulls have twelve games left in this season. I will watch some of them, because I am a person who watches the Bulls and that is not a thing that changes after one game, or after a run of games, or, apparently, after decades of evidence that the franchise intends to test the full outer limits of my patience before eventually doing something that makes me feel vindicated. That is what sports fandom is. You don’t choose it. It chooses you, and then it shows you a final score of 157-137 and leaves you alone with your thoughts.

My thoughts, for the record, are that this team needs a center who can keep a man out of the paint. I’ve had this thought for about four years. Nobody at 1901 W. Madison has called to ask.