The contracts have been inked. The farewells have been posted to social media. And with DeMar DeRozan, Alex Caruso and Andre Drummond committed to other teams, the Chicago Bulls are now firmly in the “next chapter” phase of their latest roster transformation.
So what comes next?
For two years, the Bulls doggedly pushed back against any insistence to kickstart a rebuild. But this offseason, they took meaningful steps to dig into a long-term reconstruction of the roster. In a span of weeks, their average roster age dropped to 25.4 years, signaling a rapid transformation toward a youth movement.
The Bulls are still attempting to expedite this process by trading away the three remaining albatross contracts restricting their salary cap mobility — those of Zach LaVine, Nikola Vučević and Lonzo Ball. All three players are difficult to move given the size of their contracts and their relative value on the market due to quality of play (LaVine and Vučević) or availability due to injury (Ball) over the last two seasons.
For instance, although LaVine’s departure has felt inevitable since he initially began to push for a potential move away from Chicago last October, the Bulls have so far failed to find any trade partners to offload the star. Although the Bulls continue to shop options for LaVine, those conversations have been fruitless, leading to skepticism around the league that the guard will be successfully moved this summer.
This leaves the Bulls stuck with an in-between roster. They’ve shed enough weight to begin reclaiming draft picks and investing in young players like Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu and more recent draft picks like Matas Buzelis and Julian Phillips. But with LaVine and Vučević still in the mix, the current roster offers the worst of both worlds for a team in flux.
The Bulls were a 39-win team last season. After losing their best defender and their leading scorer, this season can’t be expected to be an improvement — even if LaVine returns to his typical scoring form to balance out the loss of DeRozan.
Does all this mean the Bulls are on track to tank?
The timing makes sense for the Bulls to skid this season. Even outside of the projected No. 1 pick, Duke’s Cooper Flagg, the 2024-25 draft class is a strong one and the Bulls should retain their top-10 protected pick next year with a poor enough finish.
But there is only a slim separation between a rebuilding season and, quite simply, a bad season. At times, they are completely indistinguishable — regardless of purpose, losing is unpleasant, especially at the volume necessary to finish in the bottom quarter of the NBA standings.
The four teams that landed lottery picks in this year’s draft averaged 28.5 wins last season. The Bulls haven’t finished above .500 for six of their last seven seasons, but they haven’t dropped below 30 wins since the pandemic-condensed 2020 season.
It doesn’t help that the success of a tank job is dependent on the luck of the draft lottery. Any diehard can stoke their own hopefulness or pessimism by endlessly pressing the “SIM” button on Tankathon.com, watching their team rise and fall and rise again in the potential draft sweepstakes. And fans need only look a few hundred miles to the east to see the best example of a rebuild gone wrong as the Detroit Pistons languish in the aftermath of a failed attempt to find success through tanking and betting big on draft stock.
This is why tanking isn’t enough for a team in the position the Bulls currently face. A losing season can still be a growth year — something the team already saw with the major leap taken by Coby White.
Taking full advantage of a losing year requires a team to stick to a cohesive goal. For the Bulls, this has a few moving components — make a final determination on Ball’s ability to return to the court; give LaVine enough rope to rebuild his market value; and position the young core of the team to shoulder the majority of in-game responsibility to further their growth as individuals and a unit.
If the Bulls can adhere to this strict set of goals — and snag a solid 2025 draft pick in the process — then a losing season can ultimately feel like a win. But if improved draft standing is the only thing to come out of this season, it will feel like another wasted year.
