For the third season in a row, the Bulls were a mediocre team who was only good enough to reach the play-in in a weak conference. They finally traded Zach LaVine to Sacramento and in fact, it was after that trade that the Bulls managed to have an interesting run at the end of the regular season as they won 15 of their last 20 games. During this 20-game stretch, the Bulls were a top 10 team in both offense and defense, but that was not enough as they got crushed by Miami in their play-in game to end their season.
Even though they kept their head coach Billy Donovan, the Bulls drastically changed their playing style last season. Chicago was the fastest paced team in the league and they were #3 in 3pts vol%. Note that in the previous season Chicago had been #15 in the pace factor and #26 in 3pts vol%. This style change was done in order to try to make Josh Giddey fit in the team. For this season, the Bulls will certainly try to keep the same style as their main core of players remains the same.
Coby White was their main offensive focus and he was decent with 55.1% eFG%. An effective co-existence between White and Giddey is yet to be proved as when these two players shared the court last season (already without LaVine), the on/off numbers weren’t pretty: -4.19 net rating. The Bulls traded Lonzo Ball to Cleveland for Isaac Okoro in order to improve their perimeter defense and in order to add more ball handling skills, they also signed Tre Jones.
Chicago did not change a lot of their roster this offseason and so, I don’t expect them to be much better or much worse than they were last season. The good news for the Bulls is that if we exclude Vucevic, their best players are relatively young. Matas Buzelis also got more playing time in the second half of the season and showed some promising stuff. With the #12 pick, Chicago selected Noa Essengue who looks to be too raw to make an immediate impact in the team as he is only 18 years old, but I might be wrong. In conclusion, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Chicago is a play-in team once again.