Chicago Trial May Unmask Pakistan’s Links to Militants

Mr. Headley told Indian investigators that the officer, known only as Major Iqbal, “listened to my entire plan to attack India.” Another officer with the intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, “assured me of the financial help,” Mr. Headley said.

As the United States presses Pakistan for answers about whether the ISI played a role in harboring Osama bin Laden, Mr. Headley is set to recount his story of the Mumbai attack in a federal courthouse in Chicago. What he discloses could deepen suspicions that Pakistani spies are connected to terrorists and could potentially worsen relations between Washington and Islamabad.

India, the site of the November 2008 attacks, will be monitoring the trial for evidence of the ISI’s duplicity. Pakistan will also be listening to — and is likely to deny — Mr. Headley’s every word. Islamabad has been dismissing his accusations against the ISI as little more than a desperate performance by a man hoping to avoid the death penalty.

An American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the United States government’s view of Mr. Headley — like the debate that has raged in Washington about the ISI for the last decade — was bitterly divided. No agreement exists in Washington on whether the ISI guided Mr. Headley and the attacks on Mumbai.

“It’s not very clear,” the official said. “A lot of this is going to come out of the trial. His claim could just be his claim.”

Still, the very fact that the government is presenting Mr. Headley as a prosecution witness suggests that at least some in the government believe he is telling the truth. And the authorities said they expected the government to present e-mails and tapes of telephone conversations to support his story.

Any new evidence of ISI malfeasance that emerges from the trial will reverberate in Washington, with the relationship between the United States and Pakistan at its most tenuous in years.

A growing chorus on Capitol Hill argues that the discovery of Bin Laden’s hideout and the evidence in Mr. Headley’s case leave no doubt that the ISI and its Pakistani military overseers have played a cynical double game with the United States. Pakistan has received $20 billion in military and development assistance since 2001, and its military, they say, has sheltered Bin Laden, supported Afghan Taliban who kill American troops and guided the militants who attacked Mumbai.

Mr. Headley himself is not on trial. But he will be the main witness against Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Chicago businessman who is accused of providing financial and logistical support for the 2008 siege in Mumbai. The attack, a barrage of gunfire and grenades, killed at least 163 people, including six Americans. Mr. Rana’s defense is that he agreed to support Mr. Headley’s activities in India because he was led to believe he was working for the ISI, and therefore the Pakistani government.

Bruce O. Riedel, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution and former Central Intelligence Agency officer, predicted that the trial would be “the next nail in the coffin of U.S.-Pakistan relations, as the ISI’s role in the murder of six Americans is revealed in graphic detail.”

American authorities have kept much of the evidence secret. Citing national security concerns, they have successfully moved to quash the defense lawyers’ subpoenas for State Department cables and records held by the F.B.I. that discuss Pakistan’s links with militants.

And though the government has charged four other men, including the officer known as Major Iqbal, with aiding and abetting the murder of American citizens, the indictment refers to them either as commanders or associates of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, not as having links to the ISI.

In interviews in recent days, American military and intelligence officials who have served in Pakistan argued that the ISI’s story is complex. Some of them portray it as an unwieldy bureaucracy that even Pakistani generals struggle to control. The United States should try to reform the ISI, they argue, not abandon it.

 

Chicago News Cooperative: Group Homes to Nurture At-Risk Youths

“Our neighborhood needs to take care of these kids,” said Father Wellems, who has helped hundreds of young people avoid gangs and tried to improve their family lives as the priest of Holy Cross-Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish and executive director of Boys Town Chicago, a local outpost of the nearly century-old organization dedicated to youth services.

The neighborhood has one of Chicago’s largest Latino communities, rooted in traditional Mexican values of church and family. But it is also plagued by poverty, and the pull of gangs, which offer the safety and structure that some families lack, is overwhelming.

Now Father Wellems has another way to address the problem. After years of work, including winning the support of Mayor Richard M. Daley and persuading the city to issue $2 million in bonds, Father Wellems plans to develop a cluster of five group homes intended to serve at-risk children and their parents in Back of the Yards.

With a residential layout and two live-in social workers as “parents,” each home will strive to mimic a nurturing family environment while striking a balance between education, observation and privacy.

“It gives every child a sense of pause and a way to reboot,” said Tim McCormick, who heads SOS Children’s Villages Illinois, which has two other clusters of group homes in the state. In April, SOS Villages signed on as the developer for the group homes in Back of the Yards.

The homes are part of a broader state and national effort to keep child welfare cases out of the courts by focusing on the early assessment of youths and strengthening families through counseling and outreach services.

In Illinois, a state initiative has moved children out of the family court system with adoptions, guardianships and family reunifications, in addition to reaching out to families before a domestic crisis occurs that could result in a formal investigation. The program has been remarkably successful. In 1997, more than 52,000 children were in state care. In 2011 the number is 15,625, according to a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

In managing a smaller child-welfare system, officials say, there is an opportunity to support ventures like Father Wellems’s that focus social services on each child and family and strengthen family dynamics.

Last June, Father Wellems approached Mr. Daley to ask for a small amount of land where he could build a long-term residential facility. To Father Wellems’s surprise and delight, Mr. Daley briskly circled two full blocks of city-owned land beginning at 50th and Throop Streets.

It has taken nearly a year to get this far, but if all goes as planned, Father Wellems said, he will consider the homes his lifetime achievement. Construction is expected to begin by the end of the year.

“It’s like coming up to a base camp and it’s beautiful,” he said. “You can see the peaks and you have a vision of the mountain, but it still has to be climbed.”

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Chicago News Cooperative: Never Mind the ‘Vast Wasteland.’ Minow Has More to Say

 

Sitting high above the Loop with Newton Minow, I realized that history buried his lede — to his everlasting good fortune.

“Burying the lede” is newspaperese for sticking a story’s main point too far down. It partly explains why Monday brings the 50th anniversary of a speech that is now part of the cultural lexicon: “A vast wasteland.”

That’s how he referred to television on May 9, 1961, in his first address as chairman of President John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission. One can’t imagine regulatory chiefs or cabinet officers today speaking so harshly, and forthrightly, to an industry they oversee.

The real message that Mr. Minow, then a 35-year-old Chicago lawyer, wanted to impart was that in exchange for free and exclusive licenses to use the airwaves, bona fide “public service” programming should be provided by broadcasters, whom he addressed and angered at their national gathering in Washington. “Vast wasteland” was a parenthetical term.

The immediate news coverage, and history, thought otherwise. The next morning’s New York Times heralded the speech on the front page: “F.C.C. Head Bids TV Men Reform ‘Vast Wasteland’ — Minow Charges Failure in Public Duty —Threatens to Use License Power.”

The “men” were outraged. The producer of the lowbrow classic “Gilligan’s Island” named a sinking ship after the young lawyer, coyly spelling it S. S. Minnow.

Yet the potency remains of Mr. Minow’s excoriation of “a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons.”

“No, I could never have anticipated” the impact, Mr. Minow said last week. It was a speech given before the birth of President Obama. He later gave Mr. Obama, a Harvard Law student, a summer job at his firm, which led to Mr. Obama’s meeting his future wife.

“Vast wasteland” may be in the first line of Mr. Minow’s obituary, and three high-achieving daughters joke that his tombstone will be inscribed “On to a vaster wasteland.” It has slightly obscured a distinguished legal and public-service career, with the hitching post being the Sidley Austin firm.

He still sees television in a Dickensian best-of-times, worst-of-times light. He believes there should be hefty financing for noncommercial TV, whose growth he accelerated as F.C.C. chairman. His favorite shows are “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and “Chicago Tonight” on WTTW Channel 11 and, on Friday, he spoke at a memorial service for William McCarter, the longtime head of Channel 11, whom he recruited. (Window to the World Communication, the parent of WTTW, was a partner in the creation of the Chicago News Cooperative.)

For sure, the news and entertainment media landscape is quite different now. In 1961, there were two and a half commercial networks — ABC was seen in just half the country — and scant public television and radio. There was no cable TV to speak of, no satellite TV and no Internet. TV quiz-show, radio-payola and internal F.C.C. scandals had polluted the industry.

But, then as now, news is the most important public service, Mr. Minow says, and television falls woefully short. “Too much deals with covering controversy, crimes, fires, and not enough with the country’s great issues,” he said. Our presidential campaigns are obsessed with the trivial, he argues, despite his effort to upgrade them as longtime co-chairman of the federal Commission on Presidential Debates.

The anniversary of his speech has brought a smattering of attention, including his own article in The Atlantic and a CBS “Sunday Morning” profile next week. But some interesting things are being missed about Mr. Minow, now a vigorous 85 and a board member of The Chicago News Cooperative.

An unknowing Silicon Valley might erect a monument to him. While at the F.C.C., he helped push Congress to mandate that new television sets have UHF tuners. Most existing ones did not, meaning the majority of viewers couldn’t watch channels between 18 and 83. That inspired a boom in silicon chips and a drop in their price.

He also signed the charter for a public television station in Washington, and it became a programming pacesetter. While Chicago had had a noncommercial station, WTTW, since 1955, most big cities did not. “I was astonished that no such station existed in New York, Los Angeles or Washington,” he said.

Mr. Obama has reason to be grateful to Mr. Minow. But so do Elmo and the “Sesame Street” gang, not to mention Intel shareholders. Those are the makings of a good epitaph, too.

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Chicago News Cooperative : Sheriff Points the Way to Ending the Mess With Patronage Hiring

Tom Dart made Rahm Emanuel’s campaign easier by not running for mayor. Now Mr. Dart, the Cook County sheriff, might have simplified Mr. Emanuel’s governing by giving him a road map — and an amateur video — to solve a 42-year-old city mess.

The untidiness is the anti-patronage Shakman case, the suit filed against the City of Chicago and other local government bodies in 1969. The case prompted federal court decrees barring hiring, promoting and firing based on political factors for most public jobs and prohibited political work during office hours.

It drones on after decades of resistance — until now. Last week, Mr. Dart’s office became the first defendant found in compliance. That, inevitably, raised questions as to what Mayor Richard M. Daley’s problem has been in doing likewise.

“Dart just did a bang-up job,” said Clifford Meacham, a former Cook County judge who in 2008 was appointed by a federal judge to oversee compliance at the then-wildly disorganized 7,000-employee sheriff’s office.

Twenty-nine months later, a federal magistrate just dismissed the sheriff from the Shakman case because he has dealt ably with illegal and other dubious practices. The legal tab is $5.3 million, including $2.4 million for Mr. Meacham and his staff, $1.3 million for outside lawyers at Hinshaw & Culbertson, $918,000 for the lawyer Michael Shakman and aides and $762,000 to claimants.

Mr. Shakman, who brought the suit the year Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon and Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock, concurred with the magistrate’s decision “because we think the sheriff has done a good job,” he said. “He’s sent the message that patronage practices are not tolerated.”

That meant personally telling managers that there would be consequences if they didn’t comply. The sheriff’s office developed comprehensive employment rules and hired both a former prosecutor to head a Compliance Office and a former F.B.I. agent to oversee an existing Office of Professional Review to deal with claims of political discrimination.

“It’s just a question of will, to want to see it resolved” Mr. Dart said. “I’d be lying if I said it was easy. But we decided it was something we wanted to put behind us. How can you expect a work force to operate well if they think everything is rigged?”

I watched a training video for employees that Mr. Meacham had produced. Its production values suit public-access cable TV — and that’s being charitable. But Mr. Emanuel should view it.

Mr. Meacham beckoned lawyer, judge and even receptionist chums to act out six miniscenes. After introductory remarks by Mr. Meacham and Mr. Dart, his not-quite-ready-for-prime-time players haltingly portrayed a job interviewer soliciting political support for a boss from an applicant; a supervisor turning a deaf ear to a worker’s claim that a secretary colleague with clout does scant work; and a jail guard flaunting political ties to get a promotion, among others.

The sixth scene is a small, rough gem: Judge Jesse Reyes of Cook County Circuit Court plays a boss firing a jail guard — Rod, played by Matthew Lakoma, a lawyer — for incompetence. But a door swings opens for an alderman right out of “The Front Page,” with fat cigar and fedora, played by Ricardo Meza, Gov. Pat Quinn’s real-life inspector general.

“You know who I am?” thunders the alderman. “Rod’s one of us! And you want to bounce him? Can’t we work this out?”

After each scene, Mr. Meacham appears. “This is completely wrong, completely unlawful,” he says after the scene with the guard trying to get a promotion and the willing supervisor.

Mr. Meacham works for a private dispute-resolution firm, JAMS, where his colleagues include Wayne Andersen, the newly retired federal judge who had jurisdiction over the entire Shakman case for a decade. Mr. Andersen told me that, three years ago, he had an “extended meeting” with Mr. Daley, held at the office of a friend of Mr. Andersen to avoid rampant speculation at the courthouse.

Mr. Daley’s relationship to illegal personnel practices has long been debated. Is it really possible that 49 administration aides and others could be convicted of criminal fraud over the past seven years, starting with the Hired Truck scandal, and he had not known of the illegalities?

“I don’t doubt his sincerity,” Mr. Andersen said, noting that “there has never been evidence Daley knew.” He conceded Mr. Daley probably did not give the subject “the attention it deserved.”

Of course, Mr. Daley, a master of detail, might well have known about kinky doings.

As for Mr. Emanuel, he has bigger fish to fry with budget and schools ills. But when it comes to the Shakman cesspool, he has to let everybody know he means business. And there may be low-hanging fruit among 80 current workers “directly implicated” in illegal practices, according to federal records.

As Mr. Meacham put it, he has to take some people on and take them out.

 

Chicago News Cooperative: Polishing Her Star on Gridiron in Chicago

Springer was a 5-foot-9, 220-pound running back and linebacker for the Dallas Diamonds. Bache, playing safety for the Chicago Force, tried to tackle her and got a concussion that, combined with another hit later in the game, ended her playing career.

Springer rampaged through the defense that day, scoring 33 points in the Diamonds’ 35-29 victory.

“She plays like a man,” said Bache, who owns the Chicago Force.

Springer, who is widely considered the best player in the short history of women’s football, is now a member of the Force, recruited in one of the team’s off-season moves to push the Force, a perennial playoff contender, toward a championship.

The Force left the league it had played in since the team’s inception in 2003 and joined the 60-team Women’s Football Alliance, regarded as the premier league in this fast-growing sport. It also shed some of last year’s players. Its rebuilding effort is led by the acquisition of Springer.

Force Coach John Konecki, a longtime assistant coach at prep powerhouse Crete-Monee High School in Crete, Ill., calls Springer “the most dominant player I’ve ever coached.” He said the pleasure of watching her play might compare to watching the great female athletes of all time, including Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

Springer, 30, who played basketball at Texas Woman’s University, played football with Dallas for eight years, and is one of the strongest and fastest players in women’s football. She can bench press 315 pounds and has run the 40-yard dash in 4.88 seconds.

Three years ago, Force players, upset after losing in their only appearance in a championship game, questioned whether Springer was taking steroids. Springer was not surprised to hear the rumors.

“I’ve also been asked if I’m really a woman,” she said, adding that such accusations do not bother her. “I am what I am, and I do what I do well.”

But women’s football does not pay the players to do well. In fact, the women pay $600 a year for the privilege to play — and it is not clear how Springer will make a living when she moves to Chicago. (For the first few games of the eight-game season, she has been commuting from Dallas and bunking with a teammate, Angela Bandstra, a Chicago firefighter.)

Springer is a special-education teacher, and she has applied to teach at a private school in Chicago. She has also taken the police exam.

Now that she is with the Force, there is a new problem: keeping her from injuring her teammates in practice.

Jennifer Benson, who was once a linebacker with the Force, smiled with rueful pride as she recalled a play in which she helped gang-tackle Springer. “There were four of us, I think,” Benson said. “I got a leg.”

In practice, Force coaches are instructed to blow their whistles early “when she’s bearing down on a DB and it looks like it’s going to end badly,” Bache said before the season opener last month against the Minnesota Machine at Jorndt Field in the Ravenswood neighborhood.

Springer carried the ball 13 times for 176 yards and scored four touchdowns in a 69-0 rout of the Machine before 650 fans. The Force also won its second game, 58-0, over the Wisconsin Wolves. The next home game is May 7 against the Kansas City Tribe.

Perhaps because of all of Springer’s football success — she helped win four championships with the Diamonds, and last summer played on a victorious United States team in an international tournament in Stockholm — she maintains a demeanor that, contrasted with her ebullient young teammates, is almost comically stoic.

The only feeling she acknowledged after the Minnesota game came from wearing a uniform other than the Diamonds’. “Today was rough,” she said in a monotone drawl, “emotionally.”

She said she came to the Force because she wanted to play for Konecki, who coached the United States team in Sweden and is teaching her how to become an even more fearsome running back by squaring her shoulders and aiming her body upfield.

“I want to be the best running back that I can be,” Springer said.

Bache takes pains not to make the Force too Springer-centric. She did not name her the offensive M.V.P. of the first game, bestowing the honor on the tailback Brandy Hatcher, who ran for 85 yards.

“I’m sure based on stats we could give Springer the M.V.P. every game this season if we wanted,” Bache said later in an e-mail. “We prefer to spread it around and acknowledge the various and often less obvious contributions that players make.”

Bache said she had not talked to her new star about the hit that knocked her out of football three years ago and that still leaves her with postconcussion aftereffects.

“It’s still a little fresh,” Bache said.

 

Chicago News Cooperative: Escaping Violence via the Drill Team, but Not Completely

 

They had done everything he had asked. They had worked hard in practice for months and were ready to win the color guard world championship if they could complete one more task: block out the violence and struggle back home.

It would not be easy. There were 62 teams chasing the same dream, and the ghosts and hardships of the city had followed the Chicago squad on the road. The team barely had enough money for food and gas. Hotels were out of the question.

In Dayton, a lucky few slept on air mattresses scattered across the gym of a Boys and Girls Club. But most of the team, including the coach, Michael Borum, 32, had only sheets and blankets, which they spread on the floor.

“I was right down there with them,” Mr. Borum said.

One of the team’s hardest-working and oldest members, Jeffrey Lovett, 20, who had been with the team since he was 9, did not make the trip. He was at home in the South suburbs nursing a gunshot wound to the stomach that he sustained while trying to break up a fight at a party a few weeks before.

“The doctors said two more inches and I could have been dead,” he said. “But I ain’t a street guy, so God spared my life.”

The experience rattled his teammates.

“People only see the performances,” Mr. Borum said. “They don’t see what we go through to keep the kids off the street. They don’t see what the kids go through to stay off the streets.”

In its 31-year history, the South Shore Drill Team has never really been about winning titles or glory. It has been about keeping at-risk youth out of harm’s way. On April 8 it accomplished both.

For the second time in 19 years, the team from Chicago hoisted the championship trophy toward the roof of University of Dayton Arena. The teenagers were giddy, including Rodney Nelson, 18, who wept “tears of joy.”

“Holding that trophy up was amazing,” he said.

Moments later, Rodney’s sister, Ahliya, 16, a member of the girls’ drill team, weaved through the celebration and stood in front of her big brother. Ahliya also was crying.

“Quintin’s been shot,” she said, sobbing. “He’s dead.”

Childhood Friends

Quintin Turner, 17, and Rodney Nelson grew up together in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. As boys they did everything together. They played basketball, walked to the lakefront, traveled downtown, dreamed of flying airplanes across oceans.

“I knew Quintin all my life,” Rodney said. “He was a great kid. Funny. Friendly. Full of energy.”

As they got older, Rodney said, he started “hanging with the wrong people, getting into trouble, which is easy to do where I come from.” Then he saw the South Shore Drill Team marching in a parade five years ago, throwing mock rifles high into the air and deftly catching them as the crowd, especially the girls, cheered.

“To be honest, I mainly joined the drill team for the females at first,” Rodney said. “Then I started getting out of the neighborhood and it got to be a habit.”

Rodney said he had tried to recruit Quintin too, but he had his own interests, his own plan for staying off the corner and alive.

“Me trying to do something positive with my life with the drill team — Quintin was doing the same thing playing football,” Rodney said.

Before leaving for Ohio, Rodney called Quintin and told him he was going to return home “a world champion.” Rodney was glad they had talked. He had not seen much of his old friend in recent months because he had been busy practicing with the drill team.

When the team arrived in Dayton at 4 a.m., the Boys and Girls Club where they were to stay was closed.

The team had to sleep in its two rented vans for three hours, until the club opened.

At the Friday night finals of the Winter Guard International Class A division, the team performed a skit called “Mind Heist,” based on a scene from the movie “Inception.”

 

Chicago News Cooperative | Sports: With or Without Stars, the Bulls May Go Far

As the Bulls began the National Basketball Association playoffs against the Indiana Pacers on Saturday, they were blithely unburdened by the legacy of failure that dogs their contemporaries on the Chicago sports scene. Six championships in 45 years of existence will do that for a team, as will the indelible memory of the best there has ever been in hoops.

The Blackhawks are only a year removed from winning hockey’s grand prize, but so many missteps occurred during their 49 seasons between titles that last year’s endless victory celebration evoked a surreal feeling, as if it weren’t really happening — not to this team.

Sure enough, that team has scattered to the winds, a victim of salary-cap miscalculation that makes a Stanley Cup defense thoroughly unlikely.

Michael Jordan was making his seventh run at it when the Bulls achieved their first title in 1991. Before that they had never been to the finals, a 24-year stretch of futility that was almost Cub-like. But when five more championships followed in the next seven years, M. J. and his supporting cast were appropriately hailed as a dynasty.

That simply doesn’t happen here — not since the 1940s Bears had a Chicago team even hinted at domination. Jordan’s transcendence changed the way the city felt about itself.

Thirteen years have elapsed since the last Grant Park party, and the Bulls haven’t been within two playoff rounds of another championship since. Meanwhile, the Blackhawks, the Bears and the White Sox have all either won a title or played for one. Yet the memory of Jordan ruling the basketball world is so powerful that it sustains the image of a championship-caliber franchise, even though some of the moves made since he left suggest a head-scratching cluelessness. Think of Ron Mercer and Eddie Robinson as the Jordan and Scottie Pippen of a parallel universe.

That was Jerry Krause’s doing. Krause, the Bulls’ blustery former general manager, deserves Hall of Fame props for assembling two platoons of complementary talent that helped Jordan collect those rings. But his ego-driven, unseemly haste to prove he could win without M. J. led to some inexplicably bad decisions. Putting Tim Floyd — hopelessly overmatched as an N.B.A. coach — in the seat that Phil Jackson had occupied was probably the worst of them, though the cheesy pursuit of the uninterested Tracy McGrady was a better metaphor for how far the franchise had fallen. By the time he was moved aside in 2003, Krause had to go.

The climb back to respectability began with John Paxson’s elevation to basketball boss. That move begat Scott Skiles, who as coach orchestrated the first two post-Jordan playoff trips, including a tentative foray into the second round in 2007.

The Paxson-Skiles partnership ended badly, but there was an upside: failure to salvage a playoff berth from the wreckage of the 2007-8 season sent the Bulls into the draft lottery, and they emerged with Derrick Rose. That is franchise-altering good fortune, akin to the Portland Trail Blazers liking Sam Bowie more than Jordan in the 1984 draft. But it’s one thing to catch a break and quite another to know what to do with it.

Finding a coach who’s comfortable in his own skin is a good start. Jackson, as tranquil as Doug Collins was hyperkinetic, brought out qualities in Jordan that none of his other pro coaches could tap, most notably a team-first, share-the-ball (occasionally) mentality. Rose, having survived two years of Vinny Del Negro’s deer-in-the-headlights tutelage, is flourishing under Tom Thibodeau, an old N.B.A. soul with a knack for maximizing a player’s talents while neutralizing his shortcomings. Their relationship is likely to produce the league’s most valuable player as well as its coach of the year.

Skeptics maintain that the Bulls are too young and untested to win the title, though they entered the playoffs as the Eastern Conference’s top seed. The N.B.A. is star powered, especially at playoff time, and the Bulls have none besides Rose. (But the Thibodeau Effect on Luol Deng’s tidy all-around game can’t be discounted: Deng, the 26-year-old forward from Duke, is playing the best basketball of his life.)

And about all the Bulls have done since the calendar turned to 2011 is win: they are 41-10 since Jan. 1, including 8-0 against Boston, Miami and Orlando. Their 62 wins are a 21-game improvement over last season, with a new coach and eight new players.

?Still, doubt surrounds them. Carlos Boozer doesn’t get it done every night. Keith Bogans still can’t hit a shot. Joakim Noah’s manic energy has gone missing. Kurt Thomas somehow seems older than Dick Stockton.

We’ll see. This team grows on you. Rose is terrific, and Thibodeau is really good. Right now I see the Bulls handling Indiana before a tough seven-game series with the Orlando Magic in the second round. Then the Miami Heat unloads its guns and prevails in the conference finals.

Enjoy the run, regardless of where it leads. The N.B.A. is a mess, with several small-market outposts in financial distress, and an off-season of rancorous labor strife is a given. Pro basketball could be going away for a while, just as the Bulls are getting something going.

Maybe they could try out for the Cubs.