Reminder: The Chicago Bulls traded DeMar DeRozan and Alex Caruso for zero first-round picks.
Sorry I ruined your Tuesday. But hey, Tuesday still sucks.
As I try to motivate myself for the upcoming season, I keep thinking about the missed opportunities the organization has. I know we’re talking about something that’s a sunk cost at this point, but that doesn’t mean Arturas Karnisovas and company don’t deserve to be criticized for how they handled things. If anything, it gives me real concerns about how they’ll approach their future assets. Not only could they continue to hold on for too long, but they could continue to undervalue first-round draft capital. Are picks a bit overrated in today’s NBA? Sure. But they remain an incredibly important part of building a winning team, whether that’s adding young talent or moving those picks for winning pieces now.
Anyway, I was forced to think about all this again while listening to the Last episode of The Hoop Collective. Brian Windhorst, Tim Bontemps and Tim MacMahon reviewed the results of one of ESPN’s off-season surveys, which we discussed earlier this summerThe Bulls’ offseason was criticized by voters for the lack of capital they received in the DeRozan sign-and-trade and Caruso deal with OKC. Windhorst and MacMahon then reiterated how stunned the rest of the league was by the latter.
Windhorst: “You go into a deal knowing the Thunder are willing to overspend to get the pieces they want.”
MacMahon: “That’s what I don’t understand, because when Woj announced Caruso for Giddey, the question on everyone’s mind was, how many picks are the Bulls going to get? What picks are the Bulls going to get? And when the answer was none, I mean, wasn’t everybody you talked to around the league absolutely stunned by that?”
I am a board member of the Flabbergasted Club. Two things can be true: (1) Josh Giddey was probably one of the best young players the Bulls could have gotten in an Alex Caruso trade; (2) it is inexcusable that Karnisovas failed to AT LEAST get a protected first-round pick in addition. I have already thought-vomited my thoughts on this topic several times, so I won’t dwell on it too long, but the word “leverage” is clearly not in management’s vocabulary. Caruso was coming off his best year. Giddey was coming off his worst year for a team that has more draft picks than any other team in the NBA.
Whether it’s the Nikola Vucevic trade or this Alex Caruso-Josh Giddey trade, the Bulls have built a pretty scary reputation for themselves. They currently feel like the team that can be easily taken advantage of, which doesn’t give me a good feeling about their ability to get rid of a player like Zach LaVine in the future without giving up assets. Maybe that’s why they haven’t made three consecutive trade deadlines. They don’t even trust themselves to make the right deal!
As stated in the post above, I have a major problem with Vucevic citing trade rumors as the reason the Bulls struggled to put it all together. No one had an inexcusably longer leash than this group. What really matters is on-court production, and we need look no further than this chart NBA University to remember this! Vucevic was an absolute disaster shooting basketball last season.
HoopsHype ranked the Top 30 NBA power forwards this season, and Patrick Williams made the rankings. The 23-year-old is ranked at No. 23, ahead of notable names like Rui Hachimura and Jonathan Isaac. It’s certainly safe to say that both of those players had a better 2023-24 campaign than Williams, but I guess HoopsHype is taking potential into account. I’ll take that!
WNBA viewership continues to trend in the right direction.
CBS drew 1.22 million viewers for @LVAces against. @chicagosky Sunday afternoon, marking the network’s best without Caitlin Clark @WNBA game this season
