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TheMoon's avatar

Unfortunately, when you look beyond raw W/L, the team with Zach back is once again playing well below "mid" level. They're pretty bad again.

I've looked at these two stretches with and without Zach and done a little bit of back-of-the-envelope adjusting for MOV, home vs road, and opponent per game point differential accounting for key absences. Usually that last one would be really tricky, but key guys miss enough time these days that their teams often have decent performance samples without them.

This approach didn't change the non-Zach stretch too much. Moved it down from a +1.9 to a +1.0. It's fair to characterize that performance as "mid", I think. The recent stretch with Zach though saw significant adjustment, from +0.6 to -4.6. The Bulls are simply not overwhelming an extremely soft recent schedule.

The differences are clear: defense and rebounding. Without Zach the Bulls have been the 3rd best ORB% team in the league. With him, last. And kind of by a lot. With Zach, their DRtg doesn't look bad, 115.9. That's only 0.2 less than league average. Unfortunately, their opponents have been on average 3.4 points worse in ORtg than average. So the Bulls adjusted DRtg over this stretch would have them as like the 5th worst defense in the league. They've played really poorly since Zach came back.

I would like to see a more fleshed out argument as to why this year hasn't really affected Zach's trade value. I personally would feel quite comfortable making the argument that he has been the Bulls' worst rotation player in 2023-24. Which is bad when you make 40M, in my opinion.

This stretch has been different than the beginning of the year. Zach isn't loafing as much and seems to be trying to fit into a team concept (Bulls' assist rate is actually up over this stretch compared to the 17 games without him). The fact that the results are nearly the same as the disastrous start to the season has to be disturbing if you're thinking of trading for him, no?

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Stay Chisel's avatar

Although all should be traded, I have the Bulls trade urgency hierarchy as Vuc, Zach, DDR. Vuc's contract is much worse than Zach's. He's at or close to career lows in PER, 3 point percentage, and true shooting percentage-- which is really bad for an offense-first player. He is shooting 27% from 3. Some might think that he'll regress to the mean but I think it only gets worse from here.

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