Pretty awful injury news for the Bulls, as the-only-reason-to-care Caleb Wilson suffered a broken hand versus the Spurs on Wednesday night. Team PR announced the following afternoon that surgery is required, with “likely re-evaluated in 3 weeks and could miss 4-6 weeks”.
The NBA injury report labeled it a “right metacarpal fracture”, and it’s notable (but perhaps just a coincidence) that this is the 3rd hand fracture Wilson has suffered this calendar year: during his one and only collegiate season he broke a bone in his other (non-shooting) hand on February 10th, and then his right thumb on March 5th.
This news dwarfs anything else resulting from last night’s loss, including a Norm Powell-less lineup continuing a trend of performing better than the opening night starters. Discussion regarding lineups was centered around facilitating competitive ball for Wilson.
So now the Bulls are forced to look down the priority list and see what they can salvage out of these Wilson-less weeks. It perhaps can be as simple as everything applied to Caleb Wilson now is applied to Matas Buzelis.
While it was more important to see Buzelis with Wilson to help determine their long-term fit (or not), it would be better than the alternative if Buzelis can regain some of his career momentum filling this void.
It’s still extremely early in the year, but Buzelis has had a dreadful season, and if we use Wilson’s absence in the 2nd half last night as an initial test case, Buzelis was at his worst: 11 minutes, Zero points going 0/4 from the field (0/2 from three) and 4 turnovers. To his credit, Buzelis took specific accountability after the game, but now more than ever the time is for him to snap out of it.
I could go into other players (the young ones, or the tradeable ones), and how the schedule looks over the next couple months, but those are of less concern to me.
The priority until Wilson comes back should be to make the vets look as good as possible, regardless of if it leads to wins or not.
Time for a pump and dump, baby!
That's a shame about Caleb. It's bad for him, and the team, but also fans! I was really enjoying tuning in to watch the Caleb show, even in the midst of dreadful losses. I'm old enough to have watched a lot of the 1984-1985 Bulls and even as a kid remember thinking "Winning or losing doesn't matter because THIS GUY". The DRose Bulls gave me similar feelings. And now I've been feeling them again.
I shared plenty of my Buzelis thoughts in the game post yesterday so I won't dive deep here. But while I'm glad he took accountability AFTER the game, I would have thought that at some point his "I'm weak with the ball" epiphany would have occurred to him BEFORE the 20th time he tried to drive into the lane, got stopped, and had the ball stripped or poked away (if he hadn't lost the ball on his own first)