Column: For Chicago’s sports teams, home cooking in 2023 has left their fans feeling sick to their stomach

After his team beat Michigan State last week at the United Center, Duke coach Jon Scheyer chided the media for ignoring his homecoming.

“I’m disappointed,” Scheyer said in mock anger. “No Chicago questions, by the way.”

After someone asked Scheyer how he enjoyed his stay, the former Glenbrook North star said thanks and proceeded to tell a story about a “bonding trip” he took with his players to Chicago in the summer.

When informed of the destination, the players were “very skeptical,” Scheyer said.

“I think they wanted to go somewhere more tropical,” he said. “And then they realized summertime in ’The Chi’ is actually not a bad thing.”

That’s something to remember as you sit down for Thanksgiving dinner and try to come up with things to be thankful for in 2023.

We’re lucky enough to live in a city where summertime is so sublime, it makes up for the six months of winter — and this extended run of end-of-summer weather in November has been a nice bonus.

We know that soon we’ll be back to scraping ice off windshields with an iPhone case and cursing our ancestors for settling here in the first place. But for now, being in Chicago is actually not a bad thing — unless you find yourself playing for one of Chicago’s five legacy sports franchises: the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, White Sox and Cubs.

Suffice to say home cooking has not been their specialty in 2023. What we’ve mostly been treated to this year has resembled three-day-old leftovers overheated in a microwave and left sitting overnight on the kitchen counter.

Seconds, anyone?

Whether it’s home field, home court or home ice, the advantage has seldom been apparent for Chicago’s very own. We’ll start at the bottom with the Blackhawks, who have one win in six games at the United Center after Sunday’s 3-2 loss to the Buffalo Sabres.

Everyone knew the rebuild by “Kyle from Chicago” Davidson would be a tough slog, but the presence of rookie phenom Connor Bedard was supposed to make it more tolerable. Unfortunately, the wunderkind has saved his best performances for the road.

Bedard has scored two goals in six home games and seven goals in 10 road games. The Hawks marketing department would kindly suggest he reverse that trend sooner rather than later. Because the team’s record is an afterthought, many fans just want to see Bedard score a goal. And when he doesn’t and the Hawks lose, the night is a bust.

When the crowds are into it, the United Center can be an intimidating place to play.

“I want to create that again,” veteran Nick Foligno told reporters after Sunday’s loss. “The fans deserve that. They sell it out every night to watch us play. It’s a great building when we’re playing the right way, and we haven’t gotten the results we need.”

Two home matinees this week — Friday against the Toronto Maple Leafs and Sunday against the St. Louis Blues — give the Hawks a chance to finally play the right way in front of packed houses. They can thank Bedard for that.

The Hawks, of course, share the building with the Bulls, whose favorable 2023-24 schedule had them playing 10 of their first 15 games at home. While preseason expectations weren’t high, a strong start could’ve created optimism among skeptical Bulls fans, who typically turn out no matter the record.

But the Bulls are 4-6 at home, including two losses on the ugly red court used for the NBA’s In-Season Tournament, leaving them 5-10 overall as they begin a four-game trip Wednesday in Oklahoma City. Their opening loss to the Thunder on Oct. 25 was followed by a team meeting, a precursor of things to come.

Slow starts have become as expected at the UC as Benny the Bull dumping popcorn on fans’ heads. Star guard Zach LaVine already wants out, though there’s no inkling from the front office it could become a reality anytime soon. And coach Billy Donovan’s fast and furious gum-chomping on the sideline has become more noticeable, perhaps because Donovan knows the team’s history of axing coaches during the holidays.

Speaking of coaching anxiety, Matt Eberflus’ Bears are 2-3 at home, with the wins coming against the lowly Carolina Panthers and Las Vegas Raiders with backup quarterback Tyson Bagent starting both games. The Bears are 2-10 in the last 12 home games under Eberflus and 4-13 in Justin Fields’ 17 starts at Soldier Field.

The last win on the lakefront with Fields came on Sept. 25, 2022, a 23-20 victory over the Houston Texans, who blew the No. 1 draft pick to the Bears on the final day of last season but still wound up drafting C.J. Stroud, the hottest young quarterback in the NFL. Who knew?

Spoiler alert: not the Bears.

Even an aggravatingly bad Bears team has outperformed the White Sox in 2023, at least in front of their home fans. Only two years ago the Sox were almost unbeatable at Guaranteed Rate Field, going 53-28 (a .654 winning percentage) while cruising to an American League Central title. This year the Sox went 31-50 (.383) on the South Side in their 101-loss season, leading to the firing of top executives Ken Williams and Rick Hahn.

Things got so bad this season, one Sox reliever reportedly fell asleep in the bullpen. Off the field, 2023 will be remembered for the mysterious gun shots that hit two fans in the left-field bleachers. The incident remains unsolved by the Chicago Police Department and presumably will go down with “Who smashed Sammy Sosa’s boom box?” as one of Chicago’s greatest sports “whodunits.”

The Cubs were the only Chicago team with a winning home record, finishing 45-36 at Wrigley Field for a very respectable .556 winning percentage. Then again, they lost three of four at Wrigley in September to the Arizona Diamondbacks and two of three down the stretch to a Pittsburgh Pirates club that manager David Ross correctly labeled as “not a good team.”

Those late home losses may have sealed the Cubs’ fate — they finished one game behind the D-Backs in the National League wild-card standings — and perhaps opened the door to the firing of Ross and the hiring of Craig Counsell, who seemed almost star-struck talking about his new home.

“You walk into history, you walk into the energy, you walk into a place you already know it demands your best,” Counsell said.

Demanding the best from our favorite teams has always been a risky proposition in Chicago, but some years have been harder than others.

When it comes to 2023, we’ll pass on second helpings.