Bulls open the season looking a bit different but certainly not good

did not take advantage of the schedule break

Let’s emphasize at the top: the Pelicans were without Zion Williamson¹, a matchup nightmare for the Bulls (and most teams).

One of the big storylines heading into this year for the Pelicans was their absence of a “starting quality” center. But in Zion’s absence they did go traditional with replacing him with Daniel Theis. Maybe they feared Vucevic, who showed them what “starting quality” means as he secured a double-double. He’s a machine!

That’s a joke of a lede, and we’re going to make a lot of them this season as the play will be bad and the results won’t matter. The result in this one was a Bulls loss, and it wasn’t particularly close, definitely not close enough to bring up “clutch” play and statistics².

As expected, though you’d hope with no Zion this would help, the Bulls team defense looked extremely easy to exploit. Putting Giddey and Vuc in a pick and roll defense was like allowing the Pels to run a simulation. They didn’t have enough wing defenders to match up with Brandon Ingram, who had a slow first half but finished strong with 31 points on 22 FGA. New Orleans shot 40% from distance but - and I realize this is anecdotal and biased - seems like they could’ve had more given how wide open they were.

The new offense did look faster, but at a cost

per Cleaning the Glass there were 107 possessions in this game, which is an extremely high pace. When looking at what the team has pledged to do in improving their shot profile, 51% of shots were taken at the rim which is a very good mark as well. 36% of shots came from three, but they shot 9/32 (28%) which beyond not being a good make percentage it isn’t that high of a volume. Taking out Zach LaVine’s performance (more on that next), the other Bulls shot 4/24. Giddey was ignored and missed his only attempt. There were still too many occasions where they were setting up Vuc at the elbow, or Pat Williams would pump-fake and drive towards a mid-range attempt.

The high pace was undoubtedly helped by the insanely high rate of Bulls turnovers in this game. A 19.6% turnover percentage, yeesh.

Patrick Williams only had 2 of them, but they were funny in a typical Pat way that amazingly did not evaporate when getting better players out of his way to create:

Old pal Javonte Green had 4 steals and a couple of his trademark transition finishes. Look at how Green beat out every Bull - especially Coby White - to this lose ball. Imagine how bad this would’ve looked if there weren’t an overflow of preseason good vibes!

Zach is Back (to being an overpaid scorer whose team loses games)

Yes, Zach doesn’t have a foot injury. But what the Bulls fail to mention is that he didn’t have a foot injury to start last season either, he just didn’t play well and they lost a lot and Coby White only raised his game after LaVine was out of the rotation.

This season opener was a very Zach LaVine game. He was scorching to begin the contest, going 5-5 from three in first half. But then a few unforced turnovers and bad shot selection limited him to a still-quite-good 27 points on 17 FGA but also a team-high 7 turnovers.

Defensively, he’s miscast as a wing and played like it when matched up against stronger players like Ingram. And I had some real gotcha-journalism ready to point at Zach’s off-ball defensive awareness, but the three it resulted in was waived off so no video, dang!

Ultimately, Zach shot well and looked at times like he could score at will. But ultimately was a substantially negative +/- in a game his team lost.

And this is the best case result for Zach this season, so…how will that raise his trade value, exactly?

Rotation talk!

Billy Donovan preserved the integrity of the game, AND young guys got minutes. It wasn’t much, especially Matas Buzelis, who entered the game in a fashion - as the 11th man in the first half - that it seemed like Donovan forgot. Buzelis only played 3 non-GarbageTime minutes and missed both his shots - three point attempts - badly.

But it was interesting, especially in a game where they were blatantly undersized on the wing (I guess that’ll be every game?), that Buzelis and Talen Horton-Tucker played while Torrey Craig received a DNP. And that Williams was pulled in favor of 4-guard lineups with Ayo Dosunmu.

Lonzo Ball played in under his minutes restriction, already at nearly 14 minutes in three stints, but the game was out of hand so no need for another stint. That’s just good strategy right there.

Jalen Smith may have been the brightest spot in the game? The new backup center had 15 points on 8 shots, dunked and ran the floor, his center-helmed lineups were a mere -1 in his 15 minutes, whereas Vuc was -12 in double the time.

It always comes back to Vuc.

nightly nihilism

this is where The Discourse is at this season:

1. Zion was out due to a reported illness, but could just be the start of a season-long phenomenon where the Bulls are seen as the opposite of a ‘marquee matchup’ that can run a player afoul of the NBA’s player participation protocol or whatever it’s called. Rest up against Chicago, it definitely won’t be on national TV (or even much local TV).

2. Most stats cited here are throwing out the final ~2 minutes where benches emptied