Chicago Sports

The Bears needed a full teardown. That’s why the general manager position was open for Ryan Poles in the first place. There was little worth clinging to on a roster that bottomed out under Ryan Pace’s watch, and the delusion of believing they were close only made Poles’ rebuild more difficult.

So painful departures like Khalil Mack and Robert Quinn were inevitable and sensible.

But Roquan Smith? That’s regrettable and counterproductive.

By trading Smith to the Ravens for a second- and fifth-round pick plus linebacker A.J. Klein, Poles flipped the best, most surefire player on his roster for some maybes. It’s the first move he has made that works against his renovation project at Halas Hall.

Hey, maybe he’ll turn one of those draft picks into someone as good as, you know, Smith.

It’s a trade that illustrates how far the Bears are from doing anything meaningful on the field.

If anyone was disgusted by their defense in the 49-29 loss to the Cowboys, get ready for it to plunge to new nauseating levels. At this point, there’s no longer even a shred of doubt that they’ll benefit more from losses than wins, and that’ll be tough for viewers to stomach.

Meanwhile, the Ravens aspire to something significant. They have an MVP-winning quarterback in Lamar Jackson, they lead their division and they’re always shooting for the Super Bowl.

It hasn’t always worked out, but imagine following a team that’s always going for it. Imagine the team’s moves almost always making sense. Bears fans usually have to resort to imagining.

The Ravens had a strong core with Jackson and have fortified their roster with five first- or second-round picks over the last two drafts. Now, they’re adding.

Teams that have a quarterback race to put as much talent around him as possible. Teams that don’t — or in the Bears’ case aren’t sure — are sellers. They have to wait.

Perpetual waiting is the worst of the Bears’ traditions.

The state of the team is mostly on Pace. Poles was hired to clean up his mess, and that’s a multi-year undertaking. He has been steadfast in his plan to free up future salary-cap space and stockpile draft picks. It’s fine to clear out players he didn’t pick, but Smith wasn’t part of the problem — just the opposite.

He is a top-tier defensive weapon still ascending at 25, and there’s no question about how good and versatile he is after the last five seasons. He could have been the centerpiece of coach Matt Eberflus’ defense for years.

The Ravens wanting him essentially confirms that. They have a reputation for getting it right.

Meanwhile, Poles is asking for a lot of faith along the way, and as a first-time general manager, he hasn’t earned that yet. The only track record he has is the one he’s putting together now.

Smith is more established. Everyone knows what he can do, and his star will shine even brighter in Baltimore.

He certainly will rationalize the trade internally because he didn’t want to allocate a $100 million contract extension at what he considers a non-premium position.

When Smith didn’t get an extension amid what he felt were disrespectful negotiations by Poles, he ended his “hold in” by declaring he was determined to hit free agency. But Poles won that clash on two fronts: He got Smith back on field without budging and the team had the option of going year-to-year with him by using the franchise tag.

What was the point of playing hardball only to trade him midseason?

The Bears obviously weren’t going to contend this season, and Poles’ priority is identifying which players could be pillars in 2023 and beyond. He went into this season with few concrete answers, but Smith was one of them. Hewas a knowntalent, and erasing him from the blueprint leaves the Bears’ future more unclear than it already was.

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Nobody is safe.

That has to be the message permeating the Bears’ locker room after new general manager Ryan Poles traded linebacker Roquan Smith to the Ravens on Monday –one day before Tuesday’s 3 p.m. trade deadline –for a 2023 second-round pick, 2023 fifth-round pick and veteran linebacker A.J. Klein.

Smith was in the final year of his contract, but the Bears could have kept him on the franchise tag the next two years for about $38 million total. He was 25 and entering his prime — the exact kind of player a team should want to build around.

Instead, Poles has made his most surprising — and polarizing — move as GM.

When Poles traded Khalil Mack, he was 31 and coming off a season in which he played seven games. When he moved Robert Quinn last week, he was trading a 32-year-old defensive end who had managed one sack all season.

This is different.

This is his Mitch Trubisky moment.

When predecessor Ryan Pace traded up to draft the North Carolina quarterback in 2017, he knew that he’d be forever linked to his decision. Poles will be too, particularly if Smith — who started the season as a “hold-in” and publicly accused Poles of negotiating in bad faith — continues his run as one of the league’s best inside linebackers while playing for one of the NFL’s most well-run franchises. The trade could destabilize a Bears team that already struggled emotionally with the loss of Quinn, a more obvious trade candidate, last week.

What players on the Bears are untouchable now? Justin Fields, probably. But the Smith trade might even color the way Poles looks at his quarterback at the end of the season. If the 17 weeks of this season are meant to show Poles whether Fields can — or can’t –be the Bears’ franchise quarterback, the GM just stated loudly that he’s not blindly wed to any of the players he inherited from Ryan Pace.

Not that there are many left–take away Smith, and only 10 of the Bears’ 22 starters in Sunday’s loss to the Cowboys were on the roster when Poles was hired in January. Only two defensive starters remain from 2020: cornerback Jaylon Johnson and safety Eddie Jackson.

The Bears are expected to have $116 million in salary cap space next season, plus at least three extra draft picks acquired from the trades of the past week. If Poles allocates those resources to the kind of players a modern offense needs — multiple receivers and at least one tackle –Fields will be better for it. That is, if the Bears decide that he’s worth building around. Handing the quarterback a midseason bombshell gives him one other thing to try to overcome.

Monday’s deal was surely noted by the resurgent Jackson, who inherited Quinn’s defensive captaincy Sunday amid a resurgent season, and running back David Montgomery. If Poles can trade Smith, he can certainly trade them– and there should be a market for both.

As much as the Bears praise Montgomery, he’s increasingly been on the wrong side of a timeshare with second year running back Khalil Herbert. Herbert averaged 6.2 yards per carry Sunday, and Montgomery 3.5. Letting Montgomery leave via free agency in March would, in ordinary years, help yield a compensatory draft pick. The Bears, though, figure to spend so much on new players as to make that a moot point.

The Bears don’t have an intriguing backup for Jackson — but they didn’t have one for Smith, either. Undrafted free agent Jack Sanborn might get the first crack at the starting job.

When he dealt Robert Quinn to the Eagles on Wednesday, Poles said that he was confident that certain defenders would “continue to hold it down and be leaders.” He listed four players: defensive lineman Justin Jones, Johnson, Jackson and Smith.

One of them has been traded since. Another could be.

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The Bears offense is incomplete.

“If you want to have success in the NFL, you’re always going to have to be a threat to stretch the defense vertically,” quarterback Justin Fields said. “So you have to take shots downfield, so [the defense is] not all up in your grill.”

It’s not enough to attempt them, though. The Bears actually have to start completing them.

Fields threw four passes beyond 20 yards in the air in Sunday’s 49-29 loss to the Cowboys — and all four were incomplete. He was 1-for-2 against the Patriots, 2-for-5 against the Commanders and 1-for-4 against the Vikings.

The Bears already can attack a defense sideline to sideline with their run game and the passes they throw based off of them. Now they need to stretch it end zone to end zone.

“You’ve got play-action pass, you’ve got movement passes that are out of pocket–you stretch the horizontal part of the field,” head coach Matt Eberflus said Monday. “But I think it’s important that you stretch the vertical part. Not only on the sides by the numbers, but the middle part.”

Fields is getting his chances. The Bears are successful on 68% of their pass block attempts according to ESPN’s team pass block win rate metric, ranking third in the NFL. Nonetheless, the Bears are tied for last in the NFL with 634 air yards, which measures how far a pass traveled before being caught. Only 54.8% of Fields throws have been on target, which is the worst number in the NFL.

Sunday, one deep ball incompletion was his fault. Another plainly was not.

On the Bears’ first offensive play, Fields took a shotgun snap, faked a handoff right to running back David Montgomery and looked deep right for Equanimeous St. Brown. The receiver had cornerback Anthony Brown beat by four yards, Eberflus estimated, but Fields left the throw short. It fell incomplete.

“We gotta let that air out,” Eberflus said. “[Fields] knows that. … Just a little under-thrown on that one.”

St. Brown slowed down to try for the catch, but probably could have flailed more and hoped for a defensive pass interference penalty.

“Certainly that’s some gamesmanship,” Eberflus said. “We let the guys use their instincts on that.”

St. Brown had a touchdown in his hands later in the game. When the Cowboys jumped offside with 20 seconds left in the first half, Fields knew he had a free play and launched a ball to the front right pylon. St. Brown leaped for the ball with both hands but Brown helped poke it away.

“That was a wonderful throw,” Eberflus said. “I’ve been saying it all along, he’s a wonderful deep ball thrower. He can put it on a dime, drop it in the bucket, whatever metaphor you want to use. He certainly had a couple of good ones there.”

The other came when, with 2:45 to play in the first half, receiver Velus Jones split wide and beat Brown down the right sideline. Fields launched the ball 54 yards in the air, and it landed in both of the rookie’s hands at the 4. Jones, who has muffed two punts this season, dropped it as he fell to the ground.

“He worked himself open all the way down the field, and that ball was on the money,” Eberflus said.

One of the benefits of the Bears’ successful run game is the mismatches they can get deep down the field. It hasn’t produced success. Of the nine passing quadrants beyond the line of scrimmage — to the left, right and middle from 0-10 yards, 11-20 and 20-plus — Fields has a passer rating above league average on only two.

Fixing that is the next step.

“It would be a big help rounding out the offense,” running back Khalil Herbert said.

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When Roy Curry was coaching football at Robeson, he would sometimes let an assistant run practice when he went to scout future opponents.

The assistant was Lexie Spurlock.

“I would always leave and I knew the team was in good hands,” Curry said Monday.

Spurlock later took over as head coach at Morgan Park, and that program was in good hands as well.

One of the most successful and most respected football coaches in Public League history, Spurlock died on Friday. He was 76.

Over a 16-year span from 1995 to 2010, Spurlock guided the Mustangs to 12 IHSA playoff berths and a 137-59 record. They reached the Class 7A semifinals in 2004, and advanced to the quarterfinals in 2003, ’06 and ’07. Morgan Park also won the 2007 Prep Bowl.

“He was a great disciplinarian and a hard worker,” Curry said. “When he took over Morgan Park, everything elevated. I thought maybe two of those teams should have gone downstate.”

Mickey Pruitt, who went on to play for the Bears and Cowboys and now is Deputy Director of Sports Administration for Chicago Public Schools, was coached by Spurlock in track and football at Robeson. They also were fraternity brothers.

“He was fun to be coached by,” Pruitt said. “He had a good, good spirit with him. … A coach that people really liked.”

Current Morgan Park coach and alum Chris James talked about Spurlock after the Mustangs’ IHSA playoff win over Fenwick on Saturday.

“We were expecting it, but when it happened it was still hard,” James said. “It was tough on me [Friday] and [Saturday]. It wasn’t about football, it was everything he did for us and how close we felt to him.”

James said Spurlock was following this year’s Morgan Park team, which is 9-1 and among the Class 5A favorites.

“I would text him after games and we talked a lot,” James said.

“I just wanted to make him proud. He always told me I didn’t have to make him proud, just do things the Morgan Park way. That has always been my entire mission, to get back to where he had us as a program.”

That was at the top of the Public League pecking order.

“There was a time where he was the top coach in the city and he had the top teams in the city,” Curry said.

“We were really close to winning a state championship,” James said. “So I want to bring that to the school but I also wanted to do the things that he did as far as building men.

“That was his thing. And it wasn’t a democracy, it was a dictatorship.”

Contributing: Michael O’Brien

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Roquan Smith is now a Baltimore Ravens linebacker

A franchise that had the famous linebacker compared to Roquan Smith this offseason is now getting the All-Pro player. Chicago Bears fans were talking themselves into eating an insane future contract to keep Smith. He was compared to Ray Lewis for having 300 tackles for loss and  30 tackles for loss in a two-year span. According to a report by Ian Rapoport, Smith was traded to the Baltimore Ravens for a second and fifth-round draft pick Monday afternoon.

It was reported that the Bears wanted two first-round picks for the two-time holdout linebacker amid a contract year without an agent representing him. Smith’s God-awful performance in Dallas didn’t help general manager Ryan Poles leverage. The stat packer was the second lowest-rated Bears defender by Pro Football Focus in Week 8 against the Dallas Cowboys. Smith was rated 28.5 overall in the game for being about as bad in coverage as he was at stopping the run. And Roquan Smith gave up a touchdown on a missed tackle in the running game.

Poles made absolute magic out of this trade. Bears fans should be asking him to do David Montgomery next.

Bears fans react to the trade on Twitter

Bears fans didn’t seem too excited to lose one of the franchise’s best off-the-ball linebackers in franchise history.

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With less than 9% of the NBA’s regular season in the books, it’s too early to call sample sizes full-grown trends.

Especially when it comes to a Bulls team that counted on “continuity” to be the standard in which they close the gap in the Eastern Conference when offseason roster decisions were made, but instead have been dealt a cruel hand of inconsistency in that department.

Starting point guard Lonzo Ball? A late-September knee surgery with an ongoing wait-and-see for a re-evaluation.

Max contract Zach LaVine? A knee management program that has the two-time All-Star a part-time regular both in games and practices.

The defense? Great in quarters two and three, while very suspect when it comes to starting and finishing games.

As DeMar DeRozan pointed out, it’s only that third one that his locker room has control over.

“It just hasn’t been good enough, especially at the start of games,” DeRozan said of the defense. “We’ve got to come out more aggressive, and not let teams get comfortable. We have too much indecision. We’ve got to take out the indecision once they hit a couple shots. We’ve got to make them do something else.”

DeRozan was very right about one thing: Opposing teams are operating way too comfortably against the Bulls.

While DeRozan & Co. are only giving up 113.1 points per game [15th in the NBA], they are allowing 24th in field goal percentage at 47.8% and 28th in three-point percentage at 43.2%.

A healthy Ball will help that when — and if — he returns at some point this season, but the LaVine situation is proving to be much trickier. Defense is about communicating and repetition, especially when the focus of that defense is on a backcourt playing a disruptive style like coach Billy Donovan expects.

That’s hard to do when LaVine is operating under restrictions.

The LaVine the Bulls saw play a tenacious brand of defense with Team USA in the 2021 summer and into the first six weeks of last season is gone. Or at least on sabbatical for a time.

LaVine’s defensive rating in the 2019-20 season was a career-best 110.4. He was well on his way to breaking that early last season, and then the left knee started to betray him. By the end of the 2021-22 campaign, he finished with a career-worst rating of 116.1.

Through the four games he’s played in this season, he sits at 114.6, which is still over his career average of 113.7.

Brass tacks? The Bulls maxed LaVine at five years, $215 million with the hope that he would stay an elite scorer, as well as continue inching his way to being more of a two-way player. At least in Year 1 of the deal, that’s very unlikely.

That doesn’t mean that executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas shouldn’t sleep well at night.

His bench additions of Goran Dragic and Andre Drummond have resulted in a bigger impact than expected.

Dragic has proven to be the tip of the spear for the “Bench Mob II,” leading the team in plus/minus with a plus-31. Considering he’s done that in just 17.4 minutes per game is what’s been remarkable.

Drummond, who was still dealing with a shoulder issue as of Monday, hasn’t been far off, tied for second in plus/minus with Alex Caruso at plus-29, while averaging 16.8 minutes per game.

But the most important stat that Karnisovas can embrace? Two of the three wins his team currently has.

In beating Miami and Boston — both expected to be playoff teams — the Bulls at least showed some life against the East’s elite.

Last season, it was a combined 1-14 record against Miami, Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. It’s 2-1 so far this season, and the Bulls had the 76ers on the ropes Saturday night.

Just a meaningless sample size? The Bulls hope not.

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Contrary to what most might figure, Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson isn’t looking at the current NHL standings and cringing.

Sure, even he is slightly surprised to see the Hawks sitting third place in the Central Division entering Monday, having earned 10 points from their first nine games. But he stands by what he insisted at the start of training camp, that he actually does want them to win. Seeing them actually do that isn’t changing his mind.

“I feel really great for [coach Luke Richardson] and the staff,” Davidson told the Sun-Times. “They set out with a plan, based on the type of players we brought in, and it has been really impressive. The players have responded. They’re competing hard every night and playing a really strong team game.

“Having a coach that can deliver a message is extremely important, and that’s what we’re seeing. Winning helps him…build a culture, and that’s very positive. You take positives where you can find them, and this is a big one.”

It’s worth noting the Hawks have fallen back below actual .500 — with four wins and five losses — after squandering third-period leads in three straight outings. Their 42.9% team scoring-chance ratio at five-on-five, which ranks 29th in the league, isn’t great either.

Nonetheless, where it actually counts, they’re still playing at a 91-point pace. That entered Monday tied for 14th in the NHL; it would’ve been 19th last year.

They’ve scored 31 goals and allowed 30. They’ve suffered only one loss by multiple goals, and that was in the season opener; only the Golden Knights (with zero) have suffered fewer. Their special teams look legitimately dangerous: they rank fourth in net power-play conversion rate and 10th in net penalty-kill rate. And their goaltending has held up well: their .903 team save percentage ranks 15th.

These Hawks may not be world-beaters or even playoff contenders, but they are undeniably competitive. That competitiveness has been so consistent — on a nightly basis over a sizable nine-game sample — that it no longer seems fluky.

‘We’re at the point now where we’re pretty confident in our game,” Patrick Kane said Saturday. “[We] feel like we can go into any game and compete and win.”

That’s a dramatically different attitude than teams like the Sharks (3-8-0 with a minus-10 goal differential), Coyotes (2-5-1, minus-12) and Ducks (2-6-1, minus-19) are currently emanating. And that’s bad news for the Hawks’ unstated-yet-obvious initial objective to land a top-three pick in next summer’s draft, which will only be guaranteed if they finish dead last.

But Davidson maintains he’s unconcerned. Asked how he’d respond if the Hawks kept this up into the winter and spring — his options would range from jettisoning players (to undermine the success) to pivoting and bringing in more depth (leaning into the success) — he took the middle route.

“I don’t think we’re going to change our course at all,” he said. “We’ll see where we’re at and go from there. How we handle it, we’ll see, but we’ll get there first.”

Thinking long-term, Richardson’s stellar first few months as an NHL head coach justify cheer without caveats.

The Hawks hired Richardson hoping he’d remain their coach not only through the rebuild but also into the next era of contention. If he can get this much out of a roster this weak, it’s exciting to imagine where he could take an actually talented, well-constructed team years from now.

“He has been phenomenal,” Davidson said. “Coming in new on the job, you don’t fully know what to expect, but I was very optimistic he would be able to do some positive things. Through the interview process, we had a really good feeling about him… It has come to fruition that our instincts were right.”

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In a shocking move, the Bears are trading linebacker Roquan Smith to the Ravens.

The Bears are getting a second-round pick and a fifth-rounder in return, per a source.

Smith, the team’s best player, is in the final year of his contract. The Bears, though, could have controlled him through the 2024 season by giving him the franchise tag next year and then doing so again.

The linebacker conducted a “hold-in” at the start of the season after he and new general manager Ryan Poles couldn’t hammer out a contract extension. He then demanded a trade, issuing a public statement that said the first-year GM was not negotiating in good faith.

Smith backed off his demand, eventually returning to preseason practices. He said he would focus on the season instead of a new deal. Smith leads the NFL with 83 tackles and was one of the team’s four captains.

“I feel like I’m in the same head space that I was back when I asked [for a trade] — and that was declined,” Smith said last week. “I shift my focus to just being the best guy I can to the guys in the locker room. The best guy to myself and to the loyal fans.”

The trade marks the second-straight big name player that Poles has shipped out of Halas Hall in five days. After trading Robert Quinn, another captain, to the Eagles on Wednesday, Poles listed Smith as one of the leaders could help fill the void on the defensive side of the ball.

Now Smith is gone, too.

Poles’ decision to move him makes it official: he doesn’t feel an inherent obligation to keep players from the Ryan Pace regime. Poles drafted Smith, a Butkus Award-winning linebacker at Georgia, with the eighth overall pick in 2018. He held out during his first-year training camp while his agent argued for protections against how his contract would be affected by the NFL’s new on-field penalty rules. He returned midway through camp but was still limited when the Bears opened the season against the season against the Packers.

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Could Anthony Davis be on the move this winter?

The Chicago Bulls enter today with a 3-4 record, coming off a tough loss at home last night to the Philadelphia 76ers. Joel Embiid took over late, and even took a jab at the city of Chicago in an Instagram post later that evening. It was a rough night for the Bulls as they dropped their second game in a row. It’s been an up and down start, leaving fans to wonder how high the ceiling really is for this injury-riddled Bulls squad. It’ll be tough to judge until the team is fully healthy.

That being said, an intriguing development to follow is the struggling Los Angeles Lakers who are off to a brutal 0-5 start. If this skid continues, Los Angeles Lakers GM Rob Pelinka could look to go into a full rebuild. I’m not sure that means trading Anthony Davis or LeBron James, but if one gets moved, the other will most likely follow. They also have no first round pick in this upcoming draft, so a tank is entirely out of the question. If the losses continue to pile up, the more likely this seems to be a possibility. 

If this does become a reality, the Chicago Bulls should at least call the Lakers to inquire about Anthony Davis.

Bringing the Chicago native Davis to the Bulls would electrify the fanbase. The United Center would suddenly have that spark that it’s been lacking since Derrick Rose was running the show. It would be a matter of how much the Bulls would be willing to give up.

Due to the blockbuster trades they’ve made in the past few years, the Bulls are a bit handcuffed on draft capital. However, they do have some solid talent such as Nikola Vucevic, Pat Williams, and Ayo Dosunmu that could be potential assets in another big trade. I think they would need help from a third or maybe fourth team to get something done, but it’s fun to hypothesize.

With the health problems the Chicago Bulls currently have, it might be hard to justify trading for another injury prone player like Anthony Davis. However, he’s not just some role player. Davis is an elite defender, maybe the best in the league, and would be an instant impact addition. Any defense would absolutely love to add a player like Anthony Davis and that’s obvious. Especially this Chicago Bulls defense that has had its share of struggles to begin the season.

Anthony Davis would demand a huge return…right?

I don’t personally think the package for Anthony Davis would be as demanding as some may think. We’re talking about a guy who missed a lot of time. In the 2021-22 season, he played in only 40 games. The year before that, he appeared in just 36 games. He’s already dealing with difficulty staying on the court to begin this year, as he aggravated his back a few days ago. While his value is still presumably high compared to most NBA players, it may be taking a decline as of late.

If the Lakers continue this downward spiral, they might think about moving him before his value takes a real tumble. He’s currently on a massive contract that was signed after his contributions to the 2020 NBA Finals, so the financial aspect of it is another factor to consider. The Bulls already have some pretty big contracts on the roster, so one member of the “core” would probably have to go.

At the very least, the phone call should be made by Bulls general manager Marc Eversley if he is indeed placed on the trade block.

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Need a soundtrack for sorting Halloween candy tomorrow? How about Christmas music?

WLIT-FM (93.9), the area’s No. 1 radio source for festive Bing Crosby and Mariah Carey tunes, announced this morning that it will turn on its “Chicago’s Holiday Lite” format at 4 p.m. Tuesday.

The Nov. 1 switchover is the earliest ever for the station in its 22 years of hall decking and jingle belling.

“Once the ghouls and ghosts are gone, we become Chicago’s Christmas music station,” afternoon host Mick Lee said in a video on social media.

Minutes later, morning host Melissa Forman was on the air talking up the change as the “Nightmare Before Christmas” song “This Is Halloween” played in the background.

WLIT traditionally dominates the radio ratings during the weeks when gives over its usual “Chicago’s relaxing favorites” format to seasonal songs.

Last year the station switched on Nov. 3.

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