Tuesday, March 13, 2018

The 45 Most Important Players to the Chicago Bulls Dynasty - #14 Bill Wennington

Bill Wennington
William Percy Wennington was drafted 16th overall in the 1985 NBA Draft by the Dallas Mavericks. He spent the majority of his first five years sitting on the bench as he was never able to make an impact in Dallas. The Mavericks traded him to the Sacramento Kings before the 1990-91 season where Wennington received his most playing time, even starting 23 games for the Kings. Still, this was not enough to impress NBA teams as he would spend the following two seasons playing in Italy.

Before the beginning of the 1993-94 season, Wennington would sign on with the Bulls. Not exactly an ideal time to be joining the Bulls as they just had some guy named Michael Jordan retire to play baseball. Even though he was still a backup, Wennington would see his greatest success playing in Chicago.

Because of that, the Bulls kept him around for six seasons, as he saw three eras of Bulls teams during his time, the between Jordans, the second threepeat, and the first year of the awful rebuild.

During the three championship years, he would be the primary backup for Luc Longley, although he would start 47 games during this stretch in place of the oft-injured Australian. Although he played in nearly every game of the 1996 and 1998 NBA Playoffs, he missed the entire 1997 playoffs after re-injuring a tendon in his left foot. His most impressive playoff performance was in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Indiana Pacers. In 15 minutes, he put up 8 points, 3 rebounds, and 6 fouls, as he just had a grand ol' time blasting fools during limited playing time.

Despite the good times, it was also a tough time financially for Wennington. Things became so bleak that Wennington got a part-time job at McDonalds (McDonalds took this commercial down for copyright infringement, meaning I will be boycotting McDonalds until they put the commercial back up or stop making diarrhea inducing food, one or the other).


After retiring, he now spends his time doing radio broadcasts and media for the Chicago Bulls. He also spent his time challenging Baby Bulls players to a game of PIG.

It was probably not a great sign that the second overall pick got dominated by the retired Wennington. To be fair, Wennington was also a Hall of Famer as in 2015, he was inducted into the (Canadian) Basketball Hall of Fame.

I could not find any information on whether he kept his job at McDonalds.

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