BREAKING NEWS: Zach LaVine has finally been traded!

The Bulls...did something!

The Bulls years-long desire to get out of the Zach LaVine business has finally been satisfied, as a day after the on-another-level blockbuster trade of Luka Doncic to the Lakers, the Sacramento Kings continued the 25-year arms race of the Western Conference and received LaVine in a three-way deal that sent De’Aaron Fox to the San Antonio Spurs.

Full trade details:

Bulls: Zach Collins, Tre Jones, Kevin Huerter, their own 2025 pick via SAS

Kings: Zach LaVine, Sidy Cissoko, three first round picks (2025 CHA, 2027 SAS, 2031 MIN), three second round picks (2025 CHI, 2028 DEN, 2028 own back)

Spurs: De'Aaron Fox, Jordan McLaughlin

My initial instinct is to not even start to dig in on the return, I’m pleasantly surprised that the Bulls actually pulled the trigger on a LaVine trade, at all. It’s a low bar, but the Bulls are perhaps the most underutilized franchise in the league and absolutely have one of the bottom handful of front offices.

Under that context, this is definitely not great value, but we knew to not expect great value. The key is it’s not negative value¹, and it was a longstanding question over whether the Bulls would even except neutral value while still ‘competitive’ for second-division postseason play. That the Bulls were not holding out for more means that perhaps they were serious about not considering a play-in appearance an acceptable goal.

That’s a good mission statement. It’d be better if the best path to relevance (let alone contention) wasn’t being immediately terrible, but again this franchise has its entrenched limitations. As they stand now, their best path is high picks in these next two drafts. So getting the pick back that they owed to the Spurs makes for a cleaner organizational mindset. It’s still too late to tank, but now the Bulls don’t have the downside risk of giving up the #11 pick this year or the #9 one next year.

Getting out from under LaVine’s contract by merely breaking it up into smaller, and hopefully more tradeable, chunks, is another example of not-fantastic work but good-enough work. Tre Jones’s contract is up after this season, and Collins and Huerter are up after next. There is still more to do potentially in the next few days to gain further flexibility (::cough:: Vuc) but nobody received today is likely part of the next not-bad Bulls team.

And we’ll see what there is left to do. But I am pleasantly surprised that the organizational mindset, finally, is no longer “we’re good enough”. This is a step-back trade for a front office that has steadfastly refused to do so in any way.

Again, it’s a low bar, a more competent front office would’ve been more aggressive and not wasted half of a season (and wasted their chance to get in the highest odds of a draft lottery win). They probably had better offers but didn’t take them to save money.

But it’s no longer fearing the worst with AKME, where they’d keep LaVine because he’s a former All-Star and they want to be “competitive”, thinking both he and the team were actually good enough.

The front office still should resign before they do more harm, but this was a not-harmful move.

1. funnily enough, the Bulls insist on just pissing away second rounders, sending one out in this trade that they received over the summer in the DeRozan sign-and-trade there