Bulls signing Patrick Beverley from buyout market

UPDATE: The Bulls are making their subsequent roster move of waiving backup-to-the-backup-center Tony Bradley. Bradley can be claimed by any team off of waivers, which would take him off of the Bulls cap/tax number for 2022-23. That’s my theory as to why he was waived instead of Marko Simonovic, as there’s a remote possibility of a claim of either but it’s zero with Marko.

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The Bulls have dipped their toes into the NBA buyout market, after not making a single addition all trade deadline and saying that actually adding players to the locker room is harmful, they’re signing point guard Patrick Beverley.

Twitter dot com information merchants Woj and Shams dabble in analysis that borders into the banal. Here, Woj says “Bulls want Beverley to bring some ferocity to the court and locker room”, while Shams says Beverley provides “much-needed point guard help.”

Beverley, now 34, is a point guard in the low-usage sense: mostly a spot-up shooter who’s merely ok at it, and a defensive skillset that’s more reputation than realized at this point in his career. He’s certainly still a personality even at this diminished state. It’s probably telling that the Lakers, a team that has high-usage stars and could use the idealized Pat Bev, jettisoned him at the deadline.

He shot the 3 at a somewhat respectable 34.8% this year, but has seen otherwise decreased productivity across the board over last season when he was an unlikely (and probably unliked) leader for the Timberwolves as they made the play-in last year en route to a first round exit.

That’s a goal we know the Bulls are aiming for, and this current 6-game losing streak has them 2 games out of (lol) 10th place.

That’s a silly goal, and signing Beverley goes against Karnisovas’s other declarations of how he sees “this group” heading into the home stretch of the season, but why worry about being hypocritical when you’re outgoingly pathetic?

The Bulls want to win, and believe in this group’s ability to do so, and they keep telling us this no matter how little we want to hear it. Signing Beverley is an extremely modest action, but action nonetheless, in that direction.

We’ll have to see how Beverley fits in the rotation. Heck, for this team he may be starting.

Also to be determined is who gets waived off the Bulls so-very-full roster. There are plenty of candidates, though hilariously KC Johnson suggested that it’ll be Goran Dragic, another ancient locker-room-presence point guard that was one of two minimum-quality signings from the offseason, who will get the boot.