Bulls vs. Nets roster and preview: oh, right, that in-season tournament thing

arbitrary and subjective yet ultimately mediocre goals? that's AK's bag!

I’m not going to get into tonight’s matchup being the start of The NBA’s in-season tournament. I don’t understand it, and I won’t respond to it. I’ll see how it plays out, both in the Bulls’ performance and whether they and other teams really put more emphasis on these games versus the rest of the regular season.

I can’t even really joke that AKME will look to this tournament as more important and cite them as success metrics if they win more than they lose. Because they’ll grasp at any arbitrary and subjective definition as a way to deflect from of their woeful job performance, and that doesn’t even have to include winning games, let alone winning ones with made-up extra competitive stakes.

The court and jerseys will look different, so that’s worth knowing in advance.

To the opponent’s roster! Which is interesting after breaking up their Big Three over the past year and a half:

The Nets are not as young or as bad as one would suspect after such moves. And while they do have picks coming in from their sell-off, they are way in the future and are more or less neutral for the next few years due to their original acquisition of James Harden. This year’s pick is unprotected going to the Rockets, so that’s logical that they aren’t going full rebuild.

With Claxton out, it’ll be a really interesting matchup in the middle as they have effectively Ben Simmons at Center while the Bulls play one of their huge and slow centers all game at that position. Hopefully that means good ‘finishing with Vuc’ and not bad ‘playing through Vuc’. Surprisingly, in their non-Claxton games the Nets have still done a very good job controlling their defensive glass.

Injury report: see above for Nets. Dinwiddie and Smith were on the injury report earlier but now are available.

For Bulls, Ayo Dosunmu is questionable with an illness. LaVine is still listed with that back issue but is expected to play. Maybe that is all precursor to resting him on the back-to-back tomorrow in Denver?

Schedule factor: home game, same rest for both teams

Betting line: Bulls -175 to win. Implied final score for a Bulls win 114-110

Game Time: 7pm central

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