At least Patrick Williams looked pretty good in his career debut

The lone bright spot in Chicago’s loss was the play of Patrick Williams. The rookie scored 16 points while grabbing four rebounds and went five of 11 from the field. Williams looked comfortable in the flow of the offense and was able to find himself space to fire off a couple of jump shots off the dribble.

Unfortunately you’ll see in most of these highlights his damage was done while the Bulls were down a ton of points, but still.

Defensively, Williams held his own in parts.

Although he did struggle a bit fighting through screens and was caught flat footed a couple of times on the perimeter.

Clearly Williams wasn’t the main problem defensively, but you can’t say it was very good defense when his lineups were -23. The Hawks more or less waxed the Bulls starting lineup.

That Williams was even with the starters was not surprising if taking in what we saw in preseason, but still would have been considered unexpected if asked when he was selected as the 2nd-youngest player in the entire draft. Otto Porter Jr. came off the bench and played pretty well, and it was a somewhat odd choice by Billy Donovan to figure a complementary player like Porter would function better off the bench.

(That’s if Donovan is trying to win games.)

It obviously didn’t work at the team level, but for Williams himself it was a solid NBA regular season debut.