Getty Chicago Bulls center Nikola Vucevic handles the ball during a game against the Milwaukee Bucks.
The club’s no-rest setback against the Detroit Pistons on Wednesday notwithstanding, there has been a better energy about the Chicago Bulls of late. And while a lot of that can be attributed to the addition of career winner Patrick Beverley, the team’s core continues to put in work as well.
Still, the fact remains that the Bulls roster is one that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without point guard Lonzo Ball there to tie it altogether. “Pat Bev” may be one of the league’s ultimate competitors, but the Zach LaVine-DeMar DeRozan-Nikola Vucevic triumvirate kind of demands someone like Ball to keep the offense spaced out.
Perhaps no player is as awkward a fit as Vucevic, whose best talents go underutilized with LaVine and DeRozan acting as focal points offensively.
Even as he has bounced back in 2022-23, averaging 17.7 points and 11.3 rebounds per game while logging a career-best effective field-goal percentage of 57.1, his ceiling and his team’s ceiling are both hampered to a degree by the mix.
As such, pundits continue to pan the trade that brought him to the Windy City more than two years ago.
B/R: Nikola Vucevic Trade Gave Bulls ‘One of the Bleaker Mid-Term Outlooks’ in the NBA
Bleacher Report’s Grant Hughes just put out his list of the five “most disappointing” teams in the Association. Although the Bulls didn’t figure into the countdown, they did receive honorable (dishonorable?) mention from the hoops scribe.
The Vucevic trade figured prominently in his assessment, too:
Built to score in bunches and win in the short term, this team surrendered two first-rounders and Wendell Carter Jr. to add Nikola Vucevic at the 2021 trade deadline, signed a 32-year-old DeMar DeRozan to a three-year, $81.9 million contract the ensuing offseason and maxed out Zach LaVine this past summer.
Those moves made Chicago’s intentions crystal clear, even if outside observers couldn’t look at this roster and see more than a .500 team.
Aging, nowhere near competing for a championship and short on the draft picks that would normally give a losing team avenues of escape, the Bulls have one of the bleaker mid-term outlooks in the league. With that said, this was easy to see coming from the moment of the Vooch trade.
The three-man lineup combination of LaVine, DeRozan and Vucevic has a net rating of 1.2 this season. And with Bulls VP Arturas Karnisovas declining to move the latter at the deadline — he also spoke post-deadline of re-signing “Vooch,” who will be a free agent this summer — the Bulls may be locked into the same middle ground next season.
Zach LaVine Makes Weird History
One of the few bright spots during the loss to the Pistons was the play of LaVine, who scored 41 points on 14-of-20 shooting and 6-of-9 from deep. The rest of the baller’s game left something to be desired, though, as he collected just one rebound and didn’t dish out a single assist.
In doing so, he set the kind of record will undoubtedly make some fans scoff. As relayed by BullsMuse on Twitter, LaVine scored the most points in a single game in league history with one or fewer rebounds and no assists.
To the things a step further, though, there have only been 31 individual performances in the NBA annals where players have scored even 30-plus with one or fewer boards and no dimes.