Jerry Reinsdorf: Bulls let Joakim Noah walk because he is no longer ‘frontline guy’
Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf explained that there was a very simple reason Joakim Noah is no longer with the team.
Reinsdorf, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame on Friday, told K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune that the team simply didn’t see Noah as a big-time player anymore.
“What we felt was it was time,” Reinsdorf said of the Bulls’ myriad of moves over the summer, including Noah’s departure and the Derrick Rose trade. “We felt Joakim wasn’t going to be a frontline guy anymore. I was pretty confident that Pau (Gasol) was going to leave. So it was important for us to get the center in (Robin) Lopez. It was time for Derrick to go on and play someplace else and try to establish himself. Gar and Pax were high on the Grant kid (Jerian). We thought that was the necessary first step no matter how we were going to go.”
What we do know, supposedly, is that Noah and the team’s front office did not quite see eye-to-eye at the end of his tenure there. It’s probably all the better that the Bulls weren’t interested in retaining their veteran big man, because there were certainly reports that Noah didn’t want to come back anyway.
