If Josh Giddey is a cornerstone, that's a shaky foundation

more on the moron who is doubling down on what little he has done

What I’ve seen in the reaction to the Josh Giddey re-signing is more reason to not like it: a general sentiment of ambivalence regarding this one player’s impact on a totally irrelevant team.

In a sense, it’s correct: Josh Giddey making > $20M a season is not vaulting the Bulls into any interesting conversation (let alone the playoffs), but it’s not holding them back either.

But whether egregious or not, it is another bad decision by the Bulls front office, and the pile-up of those over the past 5 years is what is very much holding them back. To put it in fundamental terms: there is no ambition, no vision to achieve that ambition, and no competency to execute that vision. In place of a mission statement aimed at greatness there is a ‘plan’ that is a desperate scrambling to identify meager goals and no confidence in achieving anything beyond them.

That is why there’s talk of a playing style instead of effectiveness. Why we hear 15-5 after the All-Star Break instead of 50-win seasons. And Josh Giddey instead of a star lead ballhandler.

I haven’t seen much criticism towards this signing in the local media, because 1) there isn’t much of one anymore because 2) the whole irrelevance thing mentioned above.

But while Kelly Dwyer is nationwide, he knows da Bulls very well:

The Bulls did not win any negotiation, keeping Josh Giddey from $30 million. Teams don't want to pay Josh Giddey $10 million per season because (most) NBA teams recognize fielding Josh Giddey means turning over the shape of your lineup over to Josh Giddey, no matter what percentage of the cap his salary takes up.

Dwyer goes on to emphasize Giddey’s known limitations, present even during his surge in box-score productivity, and they are pretty major: shooting, and defense. His lack of each - and think less of how this impacted those last 25 games and more how it was exploited in a single postseason one - necessitates not a roster built not around his strengths, but one built against those weaknesses.

I don’t think it’s impossible or even unlikely that Giddey improves in some areas. Especially his stand-still wide-open 3 point shooting, which was at an unsustainably high mark in that 25 game stretch but has improved every year in the league. And Giddey should be credited for not just riding a hot shooting hand, but also displaying more aggressiveness driving and generating free throw attempts.

But he’s not going to get more athletic (and Dwyer details how non-fluid he looks on the court), which kind of caps development you’d wish for with other 23 year olds.

The underlying issue with setting a value to Josh Giddey is the context of what team you want to build. You often hear “X% of the salary cap for the Nth best player on the team”, but how good is the hypothetical team? The OKC Thunder built a team that no longer wanted Giddey at any price. The Bulls are also in a small market (self-imposed), but have relatively massive limitations compared to The Thunder when it comes to aptitude of the front office, and thus have lower expectations.

When it comes to what *I* would have done with this negotiation, it’s important to reiterate that different perspective. Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley do not aspire to build a championship roster. They only aspire to spin any tiny amount of success, and deflect from their losses, towards continued employment.

They probably don’t even believe Josh Giddey is a future All-Star. Certainly they don’t have confidence in it happening, as they have shown no confidence in anything they’ve done. Think of how many times Karnisovas has responded “we’ll see” to pretty much any question of what his assessments are. AKME is incapable of a basic tenet of the job: evaluating and projecting their players. That’s why it was always a questionable decision to trade for a player 12 months from restricted free agency, as Karnisovas needs a lot of evidence to come to any conclusion, and the likely scenario occurred where we received mostly confusing information.

But AKME has to delude themselves in an effort to delude others (mostly Michael Reinsdorf, they don’t seem to care what fans think) because Giddey is pretty much all they have to show for their botched teardown over the last two seasons. It was unquestioned at the time, and nothing in the time since has changed it: they did terribly in the Alex Caruso trade. That shouldn’t have an affect on future moves, but it does in this case because this is how these guys operate.

If they were instead more capable, or (gasp) it was a new regime, that prior poor trade would be accepted and there’d be an attempt to try to generate some value with this next contract. All factors including Giddey’s inconsistent play, restricted free agency rules, and the cap market this offseason were a way for the Bulls to take advantage where they no longer could with the trade. Try to not merely sign Giddey to a ‘fair’ contract, one where if he improves in the above-mentioned areas he may justify it. But either sign him to a steal of a contract, or use next year to gain more information.

Using the word ‘untradeable’ in my signing reaction post was a bit inflammatory and not used practically. But it’s likely true given this dollar figure: either Giddey plays poorly and they can’t move that contract without attaching assets, or he plays kind of similarly and the Bulls figure that is good enough for them and won’t want to trade one of their success stories¹.

What is “good enough for them”? Well, certainly below the level Will Gottlieb of CHGO presents as a best-case scenario:

If he reaches an All-Star level and carries the Bulls to deep playoff runs, he will be one of the best bargain contracts in the league.

If he can’t, the Bulls simply won’t have a chance to contend while built around him. If that’s the case, Giddey can still provide value by developing the role player elements of his game (defense, three-point shooting and volume, generally playing away from the ball) so that he can scale down and excel next to other primary creators. But the issue of finding said primary creator becomes even more of a challenge with Giddey raising the floor of the team and preventing them from bottoming out.

To me, that last bit is not much of a concern: Giddey has not proven to be a floor-raiser that will mean more victories. They did win games (and the team won’t let us forget it) but it involved a lot of shooting and clutch luck against rested/tanking opponents. I think this Giddey-led Bulls team, while not one intentionally bottoming out, is very capable of ‘earning’ (through some lottery luck of course) a top pick.

And say they do. A normal, or even base-competent, front office would select a player irrespective of anything on the current roster. But that would be admitting the current roster has nobody worth investing in yet, and they just showed with this Giddey contract that they aren’t willing to make those kind of objective determinations, and instead keep selling the lie.

1. there’s an option that Giddey plays like a max player to where $25M is a ‘steal’, I just don’t consider that likely at all