A new year is only a few days away, and do you realize what that means? There’s still time for Chicago’s professional sports teams to kick yet another coach to the curb before 2024 is in the books.
It probably won’t happen. Then again, this is a year whose final seconds one could spend counting down all the coaches and managers fired or otherwise replaced before the city lights up the downtown sky with fireworks over the river.
“Ten … nine … Grifol … Weatherspoon … Eberflus …”
You get the idea.
Indeed, Chicago sports dropped the ball like never before in 2024.
Our teams partied like it was 1999 — probably the worst previous year on record — when, for the most part, they ranged in quality from terrible to, “Man, don’t you wish these guys were merely terrible?” But helmsmen such as the Bears’ Dick Jauron, the Bulls’ Tim Floyd and the White Sox’ Jerry Manuel were still in the early going, so at least pink slips didn’t drive the news cycle.
Cheating just a little, we can flip the 2024 calendar back to October of 2023, when, after a last-place finish, the Red Stars fired Chris Petrucelli, who would be replaced by Lorne Donaldson. Of greater note, in November, the Cubs fired David Ross — “He’s our guy,” chairman Tom Ricketts had said at season’s end — and replaced him with Craig Counsell, enticing Counsell with a record-setting $8 million-a-year contract.
In June of this year, the Wolves hired Cam Abbott to replace Bob Nardella, who six months earlier had been suspended by the AHL for using a homophobic slur during a game, a charge Nardella denied. Nardella, a former championship player with the Wolves, no longer is with the organization.
When baseball’s All-Star break arrived in July, the city had two last-place teams on its hands. The Sox were 27-71 — a major-league record for losses at the break — on the way to a record 121 for the season. The Cubs had followed a promising 24-17 start with an excruciating 15-31 stretch and reached the break 8½ games behind the first-place Brewers, Counsell’s former team, in no discernible way, shape or form any better off than they’d been with Ross.
By the time Grifol was relieved of his duties in August, his overall Sox winning percentage at an almost unfathomable .319, GM Chris Getz characterized things as “broken.” In firing Grifol, Getz cited “underperformance, some misalignments along the way, some different belief systems,” and those were some of the nicer things being said at the time about the beleaguered skipper.
Counsell’s first Cubs team failed to make the playoffs and finished in third place, 10 games back. After the Brewers clinched, Counsell lamented the “big gap” between the teams and called it “daunting” — an urgent message to management, no doubt, but also a bitter concession speech. At least he’s far closer to winning than the Bulls’ Billy Donovan is. In his fifth season, which is heading nowhere, Donovan has one winning record and one playoff series to show for his time here. But he’s still clocking into work every day, which is saying something.
In September, the Sky fired Teresa Weatherspoon, who hadn’t lasted a full calendar year in her first WNBA head-coaching post. Angel Reese, the rookie star to whom Weatherspoon had perhaps catered too much, posted on social media, “I’m heartbroken. I’m literally lost for words knowing what this woman means to me at such a pivotal point in my life.” They were lovely words, though little about the 13-27 Sky had been lovable.
The Fire’s coaching turnstile never stops spinning. In October, they hired Gregg Berhalter, a fitting appointment given he’d been fired a few months before as coach of the U.S. men’s national team. That meant another passing of the whistle from Frank Klopas, who multiple times has stepped in on an interim basis. The Fire, who wouldn’t recognize success if it kissed them on the mouth, have had two first-round playoff appearances in 15 years.
But now we’re into November, and that means — who else? — the coach who stood dumbfounded like a deer in headlights with a timeout in its back pocket as the clock melted to zeros in a humiliating Thanksgiving fiasco at Detroit. No, a pocketed deer makes no sense at all, but neither did Matt Eberflus during his run with the Bears, which ended at 14-32.
“I like what we did there,” Eberflus said of the final Bears drive on his watch, unwittingly uttering an absolutely perfect epitaph.
Ah, well, Eberflus and Grifol are free to make the world’s worst buddy movie together now.
Not to miss its chance, December brought the firing of the Blackhawks’ Luke Richardson. The team’s record at the time — 8-16-2 — was almost exactly on par with Richardson’s full Hawks record of 57-118-15, one of the NHL’s worst of all time. Richardson never had much of a roster with which to work, but he failed to get young superstar Connor Bedard going and juggled lines worse than a bad improv comic.
“The results did not match our expectations for a higher level of execution this season,” GM Kyle Davidson said.
But the results sure fit the city’s year in sports.
Sox outfielder Andrew Benintendi might as well have been speaking for all of us when he said of the team’s historic loss No. 120, “Same as every other loss — they all suck.”
The year is ending, and none too soon. Even if it’s too late to use the one in our collective back pocket, we all deserve a timeout.
