"Where Ball was the ultimate role player who could fit around anyone and make them better, Giddey requires a carefully designed infrastructure to maximize his strengths and cover his weaknesses."
This is exactly what I think so many Bulls fans are missing. Ball was so great because he could fit into any rotation and make it better. The only way Giddey makes a team better is by specifically building that team to suit him.
To be clear, this is not a knock on Giddey. As a Bulls fan, I genuinely hope he blossoms into a star here. This is an indictment on the front office. They think because Giddey is a jumbo guard who can pass that he's basically what they lost in Lonzo. He's not. He's the exact opposite. It just proves that they really had no idea what they were doing the first time around and stumbled onto short-term success until Lonzo went down.
My expectations are significantly lowered because of the fact that he's going to be playing alongside like 2.5 serviceable NBA players, instead of a good core led by a borderline MVP.
I never called Giddey great though, so it's not a knock on him. I said I hope he can become great, but I never implied he currently is great. He's certainly not.
I did some reading on the surgery Lonzo got and am now more significantly hopeful for his recovery. The success rate seems to be as good as it gets. The study I saw showed over 70% of professional athletes ending up playing at a HIGHER level than they did before the injury. The big question for me is if the earlier surgeries did too much damage for the last surgery to be totally successful. He does seem to be right on schedule for recovery, which is hopeful.
My optimistic, but not totally pollyana-ish, hope is that he can play 10-12 minutes per game at a high bench level.
"At the final follow-up, 25 patients (68%) had returned to sport; 17 (68%) returned to the same or higher level of sport compared with the highest preinjury level. "
"Elite unit military, competitive collegiate, and competitive high school athletes returned at a significantly higher proportion (P < .046) than did recreational athletes."
"Large single-surface, multisurface, or bipolar shell OCA knee transplantations in athletes resulted in two-thirds of these patients returning to sport at 16 to 24 months after transplantation. Combined, the revision and failure rates were 10%; thus, 90% of patients were considered to have successful 2- to 4-year outcomes with significant improvements in pain and function, even when patients did not RTS."
"RTS cannot be expected before 16 months after OCA transplantation and may take as long as 2 years postoperatively. In addition, based on the results of this study, competitive high school athletes can expect only a 60% chance and recreational athletes only a 29% chance of return to the same or higher level of sport achieved before injury."
My biggest concern from what I've read is that the healing process from the type of surgery that Lonzo had is extremely long, and crucially, successful healing depends on NOT advancing too quickly.
Compliance with the prescribed postoperative rehabilitation protocol significantly influenced the likelihood for revision or failure after OCA transplantation in the knee in our cohort.
This is it. The question isn't whether Lonzo can go for a jog. It's whether his knee will/is sufficiently healed and ready to withstand the stress of playing basketball at the highest level.
If he does it too early, he literally risks undoing all of the work he's done to reach this point.
This is really interesting context - thanks for sharing. In a season that will almost certainly be bereft of winning, a Lonzo comeback would at least be a compelling storyline. Rooting for the guy.
I think that's getting ahead of the oars. By the current depth chart (which I don't see changing), Lonzo is their #4 PG, probably #5 given the existence of Jevon Carter. Would guess that would shake out as the #13 man on the roster? So he's not getting any minutes if he suits up, and the Bulls have every incentive to promise a Christmas bonus to their doctors to ensure that he doesn't.
There may be another reason why the least prepared, cheapest, thinnest team has stacked up players in such a way that a recovering Lonzo would have trouble getting any minutes at all, but I think there's a real obvious reason staring at us. They don't think he can play, and they don't want him to play. I think they want nothing more than another season of paying him to rehab and being paid 80% of it back.
Hah - I've long given up trying to guess what the Bulls' brass sees as their actual incentives. A valuable distraction? Might put some butts in the seats? Not trying to suggest it's probable, just that if it is a thing that happens it'd be a place where I could put my Human Interest Emotional Tokens.
I see the financial interest you're pointing out. But I also see the danger of being perceived as holding somebody back from their attempted comeback. But of course that would be so very Bullsian, wouldn't it... dammit granville!
lol well it's interesting to wargame it out. I think the Bulls have him in a trap, whether it's intentional or not:
1. After this long, it won't be easy for him to get cleared and I don't think anyone will really blame a "cautious" doctor.
2. If cleared, it doesn't look like he will get any playing time at all.
3. If he's not playing and demands a trade, I don't think there will be a partner. Nobody will give up anything and his Bird Rights are irrelevant considering the offers he's likely to get next July will be non-guaranteed minimums.
4. If he demands a buyout, the Bulls can demand he give back much of his salary.
5. If anyone objects to anything above, they say they "paid" him for 2.5 years of not playing at all. (Obviously they didn't really.) I think they win that PR battle.
I think #1 and #4 are the likely endgames to this: he either spends another season rehabbing, then shows up in Summer League next year for someone and earns a contract, or he surrenders a bunch of money to get a buyout and go somewhere he can look good. Just typing that makes me feel like an idiot: it's obviously #1, right? Who would give up $10 million to $15 million when your next contract is almost definitely going to be $2 million nonguaranteed?
I don't think that was kilted's claim. He said the hope is "10-12 minutes per game at a high bench level", not high-level starter / star role player. Seems to me like reasonable, tempered optimism informed up by relevant data.
Given the circumstances, being skeptical is totally reasonable. I personally think it's cool to see some data suggesting his years of work coming back might not totally be in vain.
I think what's being minimized is 10-12 minutes per game at a high bench level" is still one of the best couple hundred basketball players in the world, and it's several orders of magnitude higher than the kind of "sport" that are being talked about in the article... which seems to be a bare handful of high school athletes.
There are probably something like 350,000-400,000 high school basketball players in the US in a given year.
While I'd say I'm less optimistic than thekiltedwonder, I do think it's worth pointing out that your assertion he had a three year injury is a bit misleading. He was injured for three years, but he's stated that the doctors essentially didn't know what was wrong with his knee for a long time. They didn't figure out the problem, and subsequently perform surgery on said problem, until like a year and a half ago.
Lonzo's injury was clearly severe and no NBA player has ever successfully come back to play at a high level, although there haven't been many who have had this same injury. But it's also not like he had surgery three years ago and his injury was so severe that he's just now getting back to the point where he can even practice. The surgery that actually fixed his knee happened a year and a half ago. A year and a half long rehab is long but not that out of the ordinary.
I'm not sure about this. Lonzo had 3 surgeries in the course of a year. That's a lot of procedures, and it's not like the first two get credited on his Hit Points total because they didn't solve the problem. They were still two operations.
Moreover, and I'm not addressing you here — I think people are missing that he didn't just have a cartilage transplant. He had a meniscus transplant at the same time. He revealed this in May when he and his buddy dressed like Kim Il Sung on his podcast:
Again typing this out makes me feel like an idiot. He has a knee that contains things that were in two other people's bodies. I think there's a minuscule chance he has any kind of basketball career at any level after this. I don't actually blame him for trying, though.
I think we're all probably arguing semantics at this point. I completely agree with you about Lonzo's likelihood of having any sort of NBA career. My point in my response to Thomas was more about the implication of his comment.
The implication being that Lonzo had an injury so bad that it's taken him three years just to get healthy. While that comment is factually true, it does leave out some important information. I'm not trying to say Lonzo's two surgeries prior to the latest one weren't beneficial at all. I was just saying they didn't fix the underlying issue.
So while I do agree that Lonzo's NBA career is most likely done, I also think it's worth noting that he didn't miss three years because his recovery was so extensive that it took that long. He missed three years because it took nearly half that time just to figure out what the problem with his knee was.
As SweetBeezus said, that wasn't my optimistic hope. I think we'd all be over the moon if Lonzo got back to his prior level.
FWIW, one of my favorite MMA fighters did just that.
Dominick Cruz was the UFC Bantamweight champion when he blew out his ACL. He had a couple of botched surgeries and then an experimental surgery which actually worked. Three years after his injury he came back and dominated his opponent. Then in training he blew out his other ACL. He got the same new surgery on that ACL and was back in a year. He won the title back in that fight and went on to defend it.
In no way, shape, or form am I saying Lonzo will come back that well (different injury, different surgery, different sport), but new surgeries & treatments change the calculus on returning from specific injuries and this treatment looks very promising.
In the massively abstract, an 8 man rotation of Coby/Lavine/Ball/Ayo/Giddey/Williams/Vuc/Smith with Phillips/Terry/Matas rotating through the 9 spot is sort of interesting.
Not like anyone is really talking about the Bulls except in a "wtf" kinda way (feels like home) but I'm not really hearing how cavalierly we're talking about Coby moving off the ball. He put it together last year being, for the first time since he was a rookie, the unequivocal backcourt ballhandler. Yes, his game should translate to an off-the-ball scorer, but in the past he was pretty hit-or-miss.
Secondly, he's no longer playing with an elite scorer, which is a boom-or-bust turning point. That starting line-up looks like it will struggle to score 90 and seems like the easiest possible thing to shut down. Two guys don't have to be covered on the perimeter and the penetration threat looks really grim — Coby is, as we've noted before, not really athletic and relies more on weird body contortions and angles to hit the rim, Giddey's stuff is mentioned above in the Bleacher Nation quote and Patrick Williams has blown more dunks than I can remember him connecting on (he had 4 and-1s all season. Coby White, Limitations Noted, had 25.) Defensively Coby was taking charges like a madman last season and I think that falls off — it might be corny but I think that had a lot to do with Caruso. The layup line that will form against Chicago from their bad perimeter defense and the refs adjusting to calling the game without Caruso probably curtails that, which was one of Coby's more promising developments.
So if you have a young talented distributing guard (and some other decent young cheap pieces as well) with a hopefully improving wide open shot but defensive defficiencies, you get rid of older ball dominant no defense players, ie DeMar, Zach and Vuc and REbuild from there, right? Litigating the past is fair and AKME may not survive it but I'm fine with this restarting point, tank or no tank there are paths forward, albeit bumpy and beyond AKME's and lil mikey's demonstrated skills. For once, though ,'ol Jerry with a $7 billion development project in the works might need to put some attention to the Bulls.
I guess my take is there's a lot of supposition there that's not supported by the facts.
* Unless Giddey's shot improves dramatically, he's just a younger ball dominant no defense player. I expect Giddey to basically play exactly like DeRozan. Same level of 3pt shooting, same usage, but terrible at getting to the line, worse from mid-range, and significantly more turnover prone than DeMar was.
* Jalen Smith is young, but neither decent nor cheap for what he is. He's a guy who would have been fine making $4-5M (though he probably could have been gotten for the minimum) but he's making twice that. A lot like Jevon Carter. Drummond got 2/$10M and for some reason we felt the need to lock in Jalen at 3/$27M. It's absurd. Unless he blows up, it's like Felicio again.
I loved Felicio, god bless his samba heart. Felicio didn't belong in the NBA, he needed a Rondo level PG to look like an NBA player and without that his minutes were disastrous and insane. My lasting image is of him getting the ball at the top of the key, and staring wide eyed as 4 players ran around him in circles asking for the ball.
Jalen Smith is an actual NBA player, one that came into the league as "Defense First" but had very unintuitive backup stats last year. His PER and TS% were incredible, his WAR/minute stats were incredible but his on/off numbers were horrible and he was benched in favor of spelling Myles Turner with Obi Toppin. Fuck it we'll just play Obi Toppin at center is wild, but that team ran, it was built to to run and there ain't no stoppin Obi Toppin on the break.
I don't disagree he's overpaid, but also his stats are there and he's going to be in a different system and that's got to make a difference in his effectiveness. It could be that him standing in the corner and hitting 3s makes is a big deal to the offense in his minutes.
I think Donovan has his work really cut out for him because Jalen is such a waif. This is a thing of mine, but I think people really underestimate how much strength and bulk (weight) matter with regard to size, especially for defense, rebounding, and setting screens
Dude is 215lbs. Like, literally the same as Pat and Giddey.
If I came to you and said, "hey, we're going to have a Josh Giddey (at 6'8" 215lbs) be our backup center, you'd kind of look at me crazy.
I also have a distinctly "Vuc-like" concern that his awesome shooting this year was some kind out outlier. In the two prior years he shot 30% from 3. Last year he shot 42.4%. Great, but it's a huge question.
I say Vuc-like because Vuc shot 40% that year we traded (too much) for him. The three seasons before that he had shot 34% combined. The three seasons since he has shot 32% combined. His one really good shooting season was this gigantic outlier.
If there's one difference between Smith's season last year and Vooch's scorching three point shooting season it's that Vooch's was done in empty gyms. A lot of guys had abnormally great shooting seasons that year and Vooch was clearly one of them.
Not saying that that guarantees Smith is a true 40% three point shooter, but it at least offers a bit of hope that his season wasn't as much of a fluke as Vooch's.
I do agree with you though about Smith's weight. The guy has fairly broad shoulders so I'm guessing he should be able to put on weight. He desperately needs to if he wants to be a legit backup center.
His NBA combine weight is 224.6 with body fat of 3.7%, basketball reference has 215, so now we got discrepancies! It doesn't make sense that he would lose 10lbs of muscle when he got to the NBA.
3.7% body fat is absurd to begin with. I know it happens, but anyone keeping that kind of level is going to be unhealthy.
I'd almost hazard a guess that he really did build up like crazy before the draft combine and probably overtrained. Like, I can't stress enough that 3.7% body fat is actually kind of insane. At that level, you're actually going to play basketball like shit because you have little to no energy to burn beyond your immediate glycogen store in your liver. It literally robs you of energy, weakens your heart, your muscles, and your bones, and makes it hard to recover properly.
I don't actually think many people can sustain very long below 5%. I'm sure there's the exception or two out there, but mostly it's a big no. The guys who get that low are like body builder types who only do it right before a competition.
Which... is kind of what the draft combine is. Everyone has this incentive to come in looking buff and muscular. So... getting back to Smith, it is conceivable to me that he puffed himself up (too much!) for the combine.
It actually kind of fits, because then, a couple months later he has this crazy terrible rookie season and looks like a complete dog of a draft pick. Maybe that's because he'd overworked his body to such a crazy degree.
Bodies are weird. We all have some kinds of set points. While you'd think that a guy could build up his body mass and then add the fat to get him back to a healthy level, that's not how it actually works.
What really happens is you pretty quickly lose a bunch of muscle. Because, again, if you don't have a healthy balance of fat to work with, it's a lot easier for the body to drop the extra muscle.
So... I wouldn't be too surprised if he did, in fact, lose 15lbs of muscle. And is probably better off for it. Some basic math:
If he was at 224.3 and 3.7% body fat, his lean body mass was 216.3.
If he lost a bunch, but then (with a couple years of getting NBA level nutrition and body development guidance) got in better shape and ended up at 215 and 7.4% body fat (twice as much as his combine weight, but still a number that's really solid for a high level athlete) he'd be at 199.1lbs of LBM.
That is, yeah, he might actually have lost 15-17lbs of muscle and been better off for it.
To add that 15lbs of muscle back and still be healthy, he'd have to get himself up to 230-235lb in total.
13. New Orleans Pelicans: Jalen Smith (Maryland, PF/C, Sophomore)
Smith moved up draft boards by improving his shooting and body. Only a handful of NBA bigs average at least a three-pointer and block, and Smith seems like a sure bet to join the club.
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I remember the talk was that 12 was a stretch for Smith, so yeah, he added a bunch of muscle and then he played more like a 20s pick than a 10s pick. I'm with you on him maybe getting push around a bunch, that makes sense to me, but I'm hopeful his motor and 3pt shooting shines through. At the very least we don't have to completely change the offense when he comes in like with Drummond.
3.7% is so low, I have a hard time believing it was accurate. Body builders barely get down to that, and that's only for shows.If you see someone ripped and jacked, they're probably at 7-9%.
The 3 point percentage looks like a textbook example of a fluke: he shot 48% from 3 before the all star break and 32% after. And the pre- number actually came down after a November when he hit 14/18 over 11 games before he had (in quick succession) a head injury and then a simultaneous heel and knee injury. There's a mirage based on percentages earned in small minutes here. When he played starting minutes (really the only playing time where it feels like there's a big enough sample to grab onto), he shot 30%.
Rather than Vuc it reminds me of Krause when he got spurned by superstars and spent his cap space on guys that played really well for like a month on their former teams. He came up with Brad Miller (huge signing, though not for the Bulls) but also Eddie Robinson, a player so foul that I had to blank out typing his name like a curse word for years.
I like signing players like this, I should say. This feels like an incoherent move, though: it's too much money based on everything other than last November, but the contract is too short if you think he's an unpolished gem that will flourish. And taken on its own it's not a big deal. In context, I can clearly visualize a time in January 2026 when Jalen Smith, Jevon Carter, Vuc and even Patrick Williams are all basically unplayable as each of them have been in the recent past and sometimes present. Patrick has lost his starting PF job to a guy that was a rarely played shooting guard for the Boston Celtics more than once!
> I like signing players like this, I should say. This feels like an incoherent move, though
Right, for the right role at the right price. If you sign up Mo Bamba or Jalen Smith for the minimum and it doesn't work out, but he was your third string center, then so what.
If you sign that guy for $9M/yr and he's the only other guy besides your 33 year old oaf of a center over 6'9", you got a big problem.
I mention Bamba since he's a true 7 footer who has a career 36% 3pct with closing in on twice as many shots taken. And is going to make about 25% of what Smith makes this year. And never mind the next two. Shit.
So he'll go from a Hall of Fame coach with an NBA Championship and multiple conference finals appearances to a coach who couldn't even recognize he had a future Top 5 player on his team... and that will make him better?
Also, just for explanation, what's the system he's going from and what's the system he's going to, what's the difference?
Unless he looks utterly lost, I think Matas gets rotational minutes from the jump. AK uttered the unforgettable "youth movement, per se" and they've already raised the specter of a lottery pick next year - not as a goal (per se), but also not as a not goal (also per se).
From YFBB's take: "starters: Giddey / White / ??? / Williams / Vuc"
Seems to me there's a pretty big hole at 2 or 3 spot in the starting line-up. So my guess is one or the other of Matt's predictions are going to be untrue. Either Billy Donovan starts Lavine there (most likely in my opinion, they will try to rebuild his value as much as they can) or Matas (much less likely, but if they don't want to play Zach too many minutes, that opens up some playing opportunities off the bench).
I agree. LaVine knows if he wants out of Chicago he needs to go out and play hard and pretend to have a good attitude about it. It doesn't really do the Bulls any good to have him come off the bench and it doesn't do him any good to come off the bench.
If Zach is on the roster on opening night (I'll be surprised if he's not), he'll be in the starting lineup. I think the starting lineup will most likely be Giddey, Coby, Zach, Pat, and Vooch. They're going to give up 150 points a night and Vooch will get mad because his rebounding stats will be down thanks to their opponents rarely missing.
I do think Matas will get decent minutes this season though, even before injuries inevitably hit. Billy hasn't played some rookies but he's also played other rookies pretty heavily - Ayo (due to injuries) and Pat. The Bulls are now in their youth movement era, so I do think there will be added expectation that the young guys get playing time. Plus, it's not like the Bulls are stacked at the forward spots. He'll get minutes.
What a horrible decision to make for Billy Donovan. Do you play a player that will want to look impressive to another team? That's antithetical to a team concept and has the potential to tank the selflessness the team's gonna need to play well.
All for what? To increase the likelihood that some GM who doesn't believe Zach "impacts winning" now will decide that he "impacts winning" if he's got a TS% of .625 over 20 games? Bulls have to win 15 of those to make it so, in which case Zach actually works for the Bulls. If the Bulls are winning with Zach, he's not going to get traded, if they don't win with Zach he's not going to get traded.
It's not fair to the other 14 players on the team that want to play the right way and Donovan loses all credibility if he gives into that. We played this game last year, we know how it plays out. Zach LaVine will tank the team in the starting lineup.
Counterpoint: 99 times out of 100, "the right way" means playing your best players and (if healthy) Zach is the best player on the team.
Even as one of the longest-standing Coby White fans in existence, I don't think it's particularly close in terms of absolute ability.
Let's not overthink this. It's a totally easy decision because there are no options. You play the best players.
The bigger danger here to losing the players is that the existing guys (Coby, Ayo, Pat, Zach) are going to lose time/role to players who have been gifted roles (Giddey, possibly Matas) or who suck, but are the only alternative at their position (Vuc, Smith).
Like, Coby has spent literally years winning the job that AKME just handed to Josh fucking Giddey?
If he's not ok with that, he's not going to be blaming Zach LaVine for it.
This is why I don't understand Billy's loyalty to this front office. They have done nothing but give him terrible rosters for five straight years now. I guess the money is worth it.
With that being said, on the off chance Zach comes out on fire and is actively making the Bulls better, I still think they trade him. Both sides are sick of each other. Playing well/winning isn't going to change that.
I don't know! 1st place in the East, you're playing well and you demand a trade? (not going to happen blah blah blah) Winning cures all, but its going to go the other direction anyways. Zach will play, score only moderately efficiently, display all his old baked in negative qualities and be an unattractive trade target while the Bulls will be a .400 team.
Like MikeDC (I think) said, I was pretty shocked he didn't take the out to Kentucky, which at least would get him out of the murderous hamster wheel of the Chicago NBA Basketball Franchise.
I think we need to revise the common wisdom around his OKC exit. Seems more likely that rather than him fleeing from a rebuilding team, he probably wanted a massive raise to take the hit to his W/L record, and they told him to go find another sucker.
I think GMs know exactly what Zach LaVine is, and he's of an age that what he is is pretty much all he's gonna be. Proving he's healthy with actual game footage they can watch is probably helpful — again I think most of them can read between the lines about his injury, but there has to be a bit of Ben Simmons-related trepidation about that. So they'd like to see him play but they have doctors that can sort that out (probably).
So I disagree with the idea of him "rehabbing his value." Of course it's better if he's playing 42mpg and ripping the fuck out of the net on an undefeated team. But everyone must understand that if he doesn't play it's because team + player are playing out the string on a very hard transaction to make. (Like it's easy for us to match salaries on the trade machine and press "Ok." Someone who has to pay him what he is owed... that's not an easy thing to do at all. It's also probably pretty hard for Reinsdorf to pay Rui Hachimura and D'Angelo Russell $40 million/year when he'd rather not pay them anything.)
I read yfBB's argument as speculating that Zach will be sent home to await a trade (or that one will happen before the season starts). Billy being sent to meet with him could be interpreted to mean that things with the front office have really deteriorated badly. We KNOW what Zach thinks of Donovan, and Donovan was still the emissary. He must really fucking hate the guys who gave him that contract lol
Another bit of conjecture: The Lakers have done nothing. Hard to say they've "moved on from Zach" when they haven't made a single transaction that would put a deal on ice. They were active as fuck last year, they suddenly have picks freed up and available for trade but now they're paralyzed. Maybe a Zach deal is awaiting something else. Maybe it's like Harden and the Clippers, where everyone knows there's really only one team pitching but it's stalled over a particular player. (Working against this theory is Karnisovas' track record, where his idea of "negotiation" is saying "ok sure.")
I agree there's probably only one team. But I'm not sure they're still pitching at the moment. And hey, I'm all for a trade happening before the season starts, right now I just don't see it happen.
I googled "zach lavine trade" while looking for any chatter I might have missed and the results were disgusting. Pippen Ain't Easy with the killer headline "Zach Lavine lands with Clippers in blockbuster trade..." (missing from the thumbnail: "proposal"). And I have no idea why anyone was lamenting Sports Illustrated's demise. Sports media is a toilet.
I think it's likely that LA wants Zach at a really reduced rate - meaning offloading basically Gabe Vincent, D'Angelo Russell, Jarred Vanderbilt, or so, and the Bulls don't want to do that either: because they know that's pretty terrible, or they foolishly think he's worth something more that.
On top of that*, Lakers are over the second apron and can't send out multiple players. So it would add a 3rd team, and I'm not sure AKME has the ability to think that creatively.
*I could be wrong about all of this; i just tried fanspo, but maybe the Lakers have a way of getting out of it.
"When LaVine is traded it’ll be for players with less burdensome contracts , nobody interesting and young enough to demand minutes in this year’s rotation."
Where do I place my bet that when this trade happens and we get nothing in return, K.C. Johnson will give us a tweet saying "Chris Duarte was better in his rookie season than Zach LaVine was in his, so they're basically the same player"?
KC's more likely to say something along the lines of: 'The Bulls were never going to get a great return for trading Zach. AKME did well considering the circumstances'. AKA No Bulls fault.
Since I don't really like the way the threads automatically fold up and make it hard to see the conversation, I'm just gonna start a new one.
Hot take: I would rather have D'Angelo Russell at 1yr/$18.6M than Zach Lavine at 3/$138M.
And I don't think it's even particularly close.
Russell is a year younger, doesn't have the scary injury history, and has been a better 3 point shooter on slightly higher volume.
If I were the Lakers, my best offer (if I were to offer at all) would be
Zach for Rui, Vincent, Vanderbilt, Hood-Schifino, Wood
The Bulls would throw in Bitim, and then have to waive or trade an additional 3 players from our group of flotsam (Carter, Duarte, Craig, Lonzo, Dalen Terry).
Bulls get Powell, PJ Tucker (from Clippers), CJ McCollum (from Pelicans)
Pelicans trade Ingram (to Clippers), CJ (to Bulls)
Pelicans get Zach, Vuc (from Bulls), Bones Hyland (from Clippers)
Clippers trade Powell, PJ Tucker, Bones
Clippers get Ingram
For some reason this hard caps every team, which might make it difficult for the Clippers since they're trading away 3 guys and getting only 1 back. Probably they could massage things a little bit to make this work though?
Do I think the Clippers are opportunistic enough to trade that nothing for Ingram? Yep.
Do I think the Pelicans are desperate to trade Ingram? They certainly seem to want to, and at least Zach and Vuc fill theoretical holes in their lineups. And by giving up CJ, I think the money is more or less neutral for them vice what they'd have to pay Ingram.
I dunno. I think if I were them, I'd do it but I'd probably want to get a pick thrown in because I think Ingram is just a better player than Zach. But maybe his contract status precludes that? Beggars can't be choosers.
On a more serious note, what would be your endgame for the Bulls with this trade? Basically just try to trade all of them (or at least McCollum and Powell) by the trade deadline? If so, I'd be pretty happy with that.
The endgame is having Vuc gone and getting off Lavine's last year. Sure, try and trade those guys again, but the mission is already accomplished in reality.
I can't see the Pelicans balking at an Ingram contract but taking on Zach. I get that it's far fewer seasons remaining, but they could just let Ingram expire and maybe that's even 'better' than having Zach
Pelicans are legit poor (po' boy, even), so if CJ+Ingram is more for just this season even than LaVine+Vuc, they may be penny wise and worry about the next two years later
I know it's not your point, but it's so crazy to me that Zach doesn't take like 11 threes per game. On this fuckin team, with guys like Vuc and Demar filling up the midrange, they're out there letting Zach just kinda noodle around and do whatever. Zach is a terrific shooter who can get his shot off as easily as anyone in the game. The team needed gonzo shooting from him and they got very good shooting instead.
"Where Ball was the ultimate role player who could fit around anyone and make them better, Giddey requires a carefully designed infrastructure to maximize his strengths and cover his weaknesses."
This is exactly what I think so many Bulls fans are missing. Ball was so great because he could fit into any rotation and make it better. The only way Giddey makes a team better is by specifically building that team to suit him.
To be clear, this is not a knock on Giddey. As a Bulls fan, I genuinely hope he blossoms into a star here. This is an indictment on the front office. They think because Giddey is a jumbo guard who can pass that he's basically what they lost in Lonzo. He's not. He's the exact opposite. It just proves that they really had no idea what they were doing the first time around and stumbled onto short-term success until Lonzo went down.
My expectations are significantly lowered because of the fact that he's going to be playing alongside like 2.5 serviceable NBA players, instead of a good core led by a borderline MVP.
Yep, definitely agree.
Whether you want it to be or not, that is absolutely a knock on Giddey. Great players don't need that level of perfect roster construction.
It's one of the main reasons DeMar was only good and not great. Because he needs a more specific roster around him
I never called Giddey great though, so it's not a knock on him. I said I hope he can become great, but I never implied he currently is great. He's certainly not.
Yes, saying someone is pretty good and not great, is not a knock on them.
"Lonzo Ball isn’t coming back."
I did some reading on the surgery Lonzo got and am now more significantly hopeful for his recovery. The success rate seems to be as good as it gets. The study I saw showed over 70% of professional athletes ending up playing at a HIGHER level than they did before the injury. The big question for me is if the earlier surgeries did too much damage for the last surgery to be totally successful. He does seem to be right on schedule for recovery, which is hopeful.
My optimistic, but not totally pollyana-ish, hope is that he can play 10-12 minutes per game at a high bench level.
what professional athletes? not a single NBA player has done it.
I misremembered slightly, but here is one article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2325967120967928?cookieSet=1
"At the final follow-up, 25 patients (68%) had returned to sport; 17 (68%) returned to the same or higher level of sport compared with the highest preinjury level. "
"Elite unit military, competitive collegiate, and competitive high school athletes returned at a significantly higher proportion (P < .046) than did recreational athletes."
"Large single-surface, multisurface, or bipolar shell OCA knee transplantations in athletes resulted in two-thirds of these patients returning to sport at 16 to 24 months after transplantation. Combined, the revision and failure rates were 10%; thus, 90% of patients were considered to have successful 2- to 4-year outcomes with significant improvements in pain and function, even when patients did not RTS."
A couple things:
"RTS cannot be expected before 16 months after OCA transplantation and may take as long as 2 years postoperatively. In addition, based on the results of this study, competitive high school athletes can expect only a 60% chance and recreational athletes only a 29% chance of return to the same or higher level of sport achieved before injury."
My biggest concern from what I've read is that the healing process from the type of surgery that Lonzo had is extremely long, and crucially, successful healing depends on NOT advancing too quickly.
Compliance with the prescribed postoperative rehabilitation protocol significantly influenced the likelihood for revision or failure after OCA transplantation in the knee in our cohort.
This is it. The question isn't whether Lonzo can go for a jog. It's whether his knee will/is sufficiently healed and ready to withstand the stress of playing basketball at the highest level.
If he does it too early, he literally risks undoing all of the work he's done to reach this point.
"The median time to RTS was 16 months (range, 7-26 months). "
He seems to be on the proper schedule. He's at ~17 months.
But yeah. I really hope he isn't rushing it.
This is really interesting context - thanks for sharing. In a season that will almost certainly be bereft of winning, a Lonzo comeback would at least be a compelling storyline. Rooting for the guy.
I think that's getting ahead of the oars. By the current depth chart (which I don't see changing), Lonzo is their #4 PG, probably #5 given the existence of Jevon Carter. Would guess that would shake out as the #13 man on the roster? So he's not getting any minutes if he suits up, and the Bulls have every incentive to promise a Christmas bonus to their doctors to ensure that he doesn't.
There may be another reason why the least prepared, cheapest, thinnest team has stacked up players in such a way that a recovering Lonzo would have trouble getting any minutes at all, but I think there's a real obvious reason staring at us. They don't think he can play, and they don't want him to play. I think they want nothing more than another season of paying him to rehab and being paid 80% of it back.
Hah - I've long given up trying to guess what the Bulls' brass sees as their actual incentives. A valuable distraction? Might put some butts in the seats? Not trying to suggest it's probable, just that if it is a thing that happens it'd be a place where I could put my Human Interest Emotional Tokens.
I see the financial interest you're pointing out. But I also see the danger of being perceived as holding somebody back from their attempted comeback. But of course that would be so very Bullsian, wouldn't it... dammit granville!
lol well it's interesting to wargame it out. I think the Bulls have him in a trap, whether it's intentional or not:
1. After this long, it won't be easy for him to get cleared and I don't think anyone will really blame a "cautious" doctor.
2. If cleared, it doesn't look like he will get any playing time at all.
3. If he's not playing and demands a trade, I don't think there will be a partner. Nobody will give up anything and his Bird Rights are irrelevant considering the offers he's likely to get next July will be non-guaranteed minimums.
4. If he demands a buyout, the Bulls can demand he give back much of his salary.
5. If anyone objects to anything above, they say they "paid" him for 2.5 years of not playing at all. (Obviously they didn't really.) I think they win that PR battle.
I think #1 and #4 are the likely endgames to this: he either spends another season rehabbing, then shows up in Summer League next year for someone and earns a contract, or he surrenders a bunch of money to get a buyout and go somewhere he can look good. Just typing that makes me feel like an idiot: it's obviously #1, right? Who would give up $10 million to $15 million when your next contract is almost definitely going to be $2 million nonguaranteed?
How many professional athletes have returned after a 3 year injury and been as good again
I don't think that was kilted's claim. He said the hope is "10-12 minutes per game at a high bench level", not high-level starter / star role player. Seems to me like reasonable, tempered optimism informed up by relevant data.
I think it's unlikely someone who wasn't able to run for 3 years will be a high level bench player in the NBA, but I'd love to be proven wrong
Given the circumstances, being skeptical is totally reasonable. I personally think it's cool to see some data suggesting his years of work coming back might not totally be in vain.
I think what's being minimized is 10-12 minutes per game at a high bench level" is still one of the best couple hundred basketball players in the world, and it's several orders of magnitude higher than the kind of "sport" that are being talked about in the article... which seems to be a bare handful of high school athletes.
There are probably something like 350,000-400,000 high school basketball players in the US in a given year.
There are 450 NBA roster spots.
While I'd say I'm less optimistic than thekiltedwonder, I do think it's worth pointing out that your assertion he had a three year injury is a bit misleading. He was injured for three years, but he's stated that the doctors essentially didn't know what was wrong with his knee for a long time. They didn't figure out the problem, and subsequently perform surgery on said problem, until like a year and a half ago.
Lonzo's injury was clearly severe and no NBA player has ever successfully come back to play at a high level, although there haven't been many who have had this same injury. But it's also not like he had surgery three years ago and his injury was so severe that he's just now getting back to the point where he can even practice. The surgery that actually fixed his knee happened a year and a half ago. A year and a half long rehab is long but not that out of the ordinary.
I'm not sure about this. Lonzo had 3 surgeries in the course of a year. That's a lot of procedures, and it's not like the first two get credited on his Hit Points total because they didn't solve the problem. They were still two operations.
Moreover, and I'm not addressing you here — I think people are missing that he didn't just have a cartilage transplant. He had a meniscus transplant at the same time. He revealed this in May when he and his buddy dressed like Kim Il Sung on his podcast:
https://sports.yahoo.com/bulls-lonzo-ball-reveals-he-underwent-rare-meniscus-transplant-procedure-on-left-knee-014033958.html
Again typing this out makes me feel like an idiot. He has a knee that contains things that were in two other people's bodies. I think there's a minuscule chance he has any kind of basketball career at any level after this. I don't actually blame him for trying, though.
I think we're all probably arguing semantics at this point. I completely agree with you about Lonzo's likelihood of having any sort of NBA career. My point in my response to Thomas was more about the implication of his comment.
The implication being that Lonzo had an injury so bad that it's taken him three years just to get healthy. While that comment is factually true, it does leave out some important information. I'm not trying to say Lonzo's two surgeries prior to the latest one weren't beneficial at all. I was just saying they didn't fix the underlying issue.
So while I do agree that Lonzo's NBA career is most likely done, I also think it's worth noting that he didn't miss three years because his recovery was so extensive that it took that long. He missed three years because it took nearly half that time just to figure out what the problem with his knee was.
As SweetBeezus said, that wasn't my optimistic hope. I think we'd all be over the moon if Lonzo got back to his prior level.
FWIW, one of my favorite MMA fighters did just that.
Dominick Cruz was the UFC Bantamweight champion when he blew out his ACL. He had a couple of botched surgeries and then an experimental surgery which actually worked. Three years after his injury he came back and dominated his opponent. Then in training he blew out his other ACL. He got the same new surgery on that ACL and was back in a year. He won the title back in that fight and went on to defend it.
In no way, shape, or form am I saying Lonzo will come back that well (different injury, different surgery, different sport), but new surgeries & treatments change the calculus on returning from specific injuries and this treatment looks very promising.
In the massively abstract, an 8 man rotation of Coby/Lavine/Ball/Ayo/Giddey/Williams/Vuc/Smith with Phillips/Terry/Matas rotating through the 9 spot is sort of interesting.
Not like anyone is really talking about the Bulls except in a "wtf" kinda way (feels like home) but I'm not really hearing how cavalierly we're talking about Coby moving off the ball. He put it together last year being, for the first time since he was a rookie, the unequivocal backcourt ballhandler. Yes, his game should translate to an off-the-ball scorer, but in the past he was pretty hit-or-miss.
Secondly, he's no longer playing with an elite scorer, which is a boom-or-bust turning point. That starting line-up looks like it will struggle to score 90 and seems like the easiest possible thing to shut down. Two guys don't have to be covered on the perimeter and the penetration threat looks really grim — Coby is, as we've noted before, not really athletic and relies more on weird body contortions and angles to hit the rim, Giddey's stuff is mentioned above in the Bleacher Nation quote and Patrick Williams has blown more dunks than I can remember him connecting on (he had 4 and-1s all season. Coby White, Limitations Noted, had 25.) Defensively Coby was taking charges like a madman last season and I think that falls off — it might be corny but I think that had a lot to do with Caruso. The layup line that will form against Chicago from their bad perimeter defense and the refs adjusting to calling the game without Caruso probably curtails that, which was one of Coby's more promising developments.
"we know Coby White isn't going to become nearly as good as SGA"
So if you have a young talented distributing guard (and some other decent young cheap pieces as well) with a hopefully improving wide open shot but defensive defficiencies, you get rid of older ball dominant no defense players, ie DeMar, Zach and Vuc and REbuild from there, right? Litigating the past is fair and AKME may not survive it but I'm fine with this restarting point, tank or no tank there are paths forward, albeit bumpy and beyond AKME's and lil mikey's demonstrated skills. For once, though ,'ol Jerry with a $7 billion development project in the works might need to put some attention to the Bulls.
I guess my take is there's a lot of supposition there that's not supported by the facts.
* Unless Giddey's shot improves dramatically, he's just a younger ball dominant no defense player. I expect Giddey to basically play exactly like DeRozan. Same level of 3pt shooting, same usage, but terrible at getting to the line, worse from mid-range, and significantly more turnover prone than DeMar was.
* Jalen Smith is young, but neither decent nor cheap for what he is. He's a guy who would have been fine making $4-5M (though he probably could have been gotten for the minimum) but he's making twice that. A lot like Jevon Carter. Drummond got 2/$10M and for some reason we felt the need to lock in Jalen at 3/$27M. It's absurd. Unless he blows up, it's like Felicio again.
I loved Felicio, god bless his samba heart. Felicio didn't belong in the NBA, he needed a Rondo level PG to look like an NBA player and without that his minutes were disastrous and insane. My lasting image is of him getting the ball at the top of the key, and staring wide eyed as 4 players ran around him in circles asking for the ball.
Jalen Smith is an actual NBA player, one that came into the league as "Defense First" but had very unintuitive backup stats last year. His PER and TS% were incredible, his WAR/minute stats were incredible but his on/off numbers were horrible and he was benched in favor of spelling Myles Turner with Obi Toppin. Fuck it we'll just play Obi Toppin at center is wild, but that team ran, it was built to to run and there ain't no stoppin Obi Toppin on the break.
I don't disagree he's overpaid, but also his stats are there and he's going to be in a different system and that's got to make a difference in his effectiveness. It could be that him standing in the corner and hitting 3s makes is a big deal to the offense in his minutes.
I think Donovan has his work really cut out for him because Jalen is such a waif. This is a thing of mine, but I think people really underestimate how much strength and bulk (weight) matter with regard to size, especially for defense, rebounding, and setting screens
Dude is 215lbs. Like, literally the same as Pat and Giddey.
If I came to you and said, "hey, we're going to have a Josh Giddey (at 6'8" 215lbs) be our backup center, you'd kind of look at me crazy.
I also have a distinctly "Vuc-like" concern that his awesome shooting this year was some kind out outlier. In the two prior years he shot 30% from 3. Last year he shot 42.4%. Great, but it's a huge question.
I say Vuc-like because Vuc shot 40% that year we traded (too much) for him. The three seasons before that he had shot 34% combined. The three seasons since he has shot 32% combined. His one really good shooting season was this gigantic outlier.
If there's one difference between Smith's season last year and Vooch's scorching three point shooting season it's that Vooch's was done in empty gyms. A lot of guys had abnormally great shooting seasons that year and Vooch was clearly one of them.
Not saying that that guarantees Smith is a true 40% three point shooter, but it at least offers a bit of hope that his season wasn't as much of a fluke as Vooch's.
I do agree with you though about Smith's weight. The guy has fairly broad shoulders so I'm guessing he should be able to put on weight. He desperately needs to if he wants to be a legit backup center.
His NBA combine weight is 224.6 with body fat of 3.7%, basketball reference has 215, so now we got discrepancies! It doesn't make sense that he would lose 10lbs of muscle when he got to the NBA.
That is weird. I checked and it's 215 on NBA.com.
3.7% body fat is absurd to begin with. I know it happens, but anyone keeping that kind of level is going to be unhealthy.
I'd almost hazard a guess that he really did build up like crazy before the draft combine and probably overtrained. Like, I can't stress enough that 3.7% body fat is actually kind of insane. At that level, you're actually going to play basketball like shit because you have little to no energy to burn beyond your immediate glycogen store in your liver. It literally robs you of energy, weakens your heart, your muscles, and your bones, and makes it hard to recover properly.
I don't actually think many people can sustain very long below 5%. I'm sure there's the exception or two out there, but mostly it's a big no. The guys who get that low are like body builder types who only do it right before a competition.
Which... is kind of what the draft combine is. Everyone has this incentive to come in looking buff and muscular. So... getting back to Smith, it is conceivable to me that he puffed himself up (too much!) for the combine.
It actually kind of fits, because then, a couple months later he has this crazy terrible rookie season and looks like a complete dog of a draft pick. Maybe that's because he'd overworked his body to such a crazy degree.
Bodies are weird. We all have some kinds of set points. While you'd think that a guy could build up his body mass and then add the fat to get him back to a healthy level, that's not how it actually works.
What really happens is you pretty quickly lose a bunch of muscle. Because, again, if you don't have a healthy balance of fat to work with, it's a lot easier for the body to drop the extra muscle.
So... I wouldn't be too surprised if he did, in fact, lose 15lbs of muscle. And is probably better off for it. Some basic math:
If he was at 224.3 and 3.7% body fat, his lean body mass was 216.3.
If he lost a bunch, but then (with a couple years of getting NBA level nutrition and body development guidance) got in better shape and ended up at 215 and 7.4% body fat (twice as much as his combine weight, but still a number that's really solid for a high level athlete) he'd be at 199.1lbs of LBM.
That is, yeah, he might actually have lost 15-17lbs of muscle and been better off for it.
To add that 15lbs of muscle back and still be healthy, he'd have to get himself up to 230-235lb in total.
This is from the Bleacher Report 2020 mock draft:
13. New Orleans Pelicans: Jalen Smith (Maryland, PF/C, Sophomore)
Smith moved up draft boards by improving his shooting and body. Only a handful of NBA bigs average at least a three-pointer and block, and Smith seems like a sure bet to join the club.
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I remember the talk was that 12 was a stretch for Smith, so yeah, he added a bunch of muscle and then he played more like a 20s pick than a 10s pick. I'm with you on him maybe getting push around a bunch, that makes sense to me, but I'm hopeful his motor and 3pt shooting shines through. At the very least we don't have to completely change the offense when he comes in like with Drummond.
3.7% is so low, I have a hard time believing it was accurate. Body builders barely get down to that, and that's only for shows.If you see someone ripped and jacked, they're probably at 7-9%.
The 3 point percentage looks like a textbook example of a fluke: he shot 48% from 3 before the all star break and 32% after. And the pre- number actually came down after a November when he hit 14/18 over 11 games before he had (in quick succession) a head injury and then a simultaneous heel and knee injury. There's a mirage based on percentages earned in small minutes here. When he played starting minutes (really the only playing time where it feels like there's a big enough sample to grab onto), he shot 30%.
Rather than Vuc it reminds me of Krause when he got spurned by superstars and spent his cap space on guys that played really well for like a month on their former teams. He came up with Brad Miller (huge signing, though not for the Bulls) but also Eddie Robinson, a player so foul that I had to blank out typing his name like a curse word for years.
I like signing players like this, I should say. This feels like an incoherent move, though: it's too much money based on everything other than last November, but the contract is too short if you think he's an unpolished gem that will flourish. And taken on its own it's not a big deal. In context, I can clearly visualize a time in January 2026 when Jalen Smith, Jevon Carter, Vuc and even Patrick Williams are all basically unplayable as each of them have been in the recent past and sometimes present. Patrick has lost his starting PF job to a guy that was a rarely played shooting guard for the Boston Celtics more than once!
> I like signing players like this, I should say. This feels like an incoherent move, though
Right, for the right role at the right price. If you sign up Mo Bamba or Jalen Smith for the minimum and it doesn't work out, but he was your third string center, then so what.
If you sign that guy for $9M/yr and he's the only other guy besides your 33 year old oaf of a center over 6'9", you got a big problem.
I mention Bamba since he's a true 7 footer who has a career 36% 3pct with closing in on twice as many shots taken. And is going to make about 25% of what Smith makes this year. And never mind the next two. Shit.
So he'll go from a Hall of Fame coach with an NBA Championship and multiple conference finals appearances to a coach who couldn't even recognize he had a future Top 5 player on his team... and that will make him better?
Also, just for explanation, what's the system he's going from and what's the system he's going to, what's the difference?
Unless he looks utterly lost, I think Matas gets rotational minutes from the jump. AK uttered the unforgettable "youth movement, per se" and they've already raised the specter of a lottery pick next year - not as a goal (per se), but also not as a not goal (also per se).
From YFBB's take: "starters: Giddey / White / ??? / Williams / Vuc"
Seems to me there's a pretty big hole at 2 or 3 spot in the starting line-up. So my guess is one or the other of Matt's predictions are going to be untrue. Either Billy Donovan starts Lavine there (most likely in my opinion, they will try to rebuild his value as much as they can) or Matas (much less likely, but if they don't want to play Zach too many minutes, that opens up some playing opportunities off the bench).
In before all the "Move Pat to SF. The reason he hasn't been an All-Star is because he's been played out of position his whole career" comments.
Oh wait, wrong site.
Agree. Even the Bulls aren't stupid enough to force a guy they are trying to trade on a max contract to come off the bench.
I think there's just no way LaVine isn't out there if he's still on the team.
I agree. LaVine knows if he wants out of Chicago he needs to go out and play hard and pretend to have a good attitude about it. It doesn't really do the Bulls any good to have him come off the bench and it doesn't do him any good to come off the bench.
If Zach is on the roster on opening night (I'll be surprised if he's not), he'll be in the starting lineup. I think the starting lineup will most likely be Giddey, Coby, Zach, Pat, and Vooch. They're going to give up 150 points a night and Vooch will get mad because his rebounding stats will be down thanks to their opponents rarely missing.
I do think Matas will get decent minutes this season though, even before injuries inevitably hit. Billy hasn't played some rookies but he's also played other rookies pretty heavily - Ayo (due to injuries) and Pat. The Bulls are now in their youth movement era, so I do think there will be added expectation that the young guys get playing time. Plus, it's not like the Bulls are stacked at the forward spots. He'll get minutes.
What a horrible decision to make for Billy Donovan. Do you play a player that will want to look impressive to another team? That's antithetical to a team concept and has the potential to tank the selflessness the team's gonna need to play well.
All for what? To increase the likelihood that some GM who doesn't believe Zach "impacts winning" now will decide that he "impacts winning" if he's got a TS% of .625 over 20 games? Bulls have to win 15 of those to make it so, in which case Zach actually works for the Bulls. If the Bulls are winning with Zach, he's not going to get traded, if they don't win with Zach he's not going to get traded.
It's not fair to the other 14 players on the team that want to play the right way and Donovan loses all credibility if he gives into that. We played this game last year, we know how it plays out. Zach LaVine will tank the team in the starting lineup.
Counterpoint: 99 times out of 100, "the right way" means playing your best players and (if healthy) Zach is the best player on the team.
Even as one of the longest-standing Coby White fans in existence, I don't think it's particularly close in terms of absolute ability.
Let's not overthink this. It's a totally easy decision because there are no options. You play the best players.
The bigger danger here to losing the players is that the existing guys (Coby, Ayo, Pat, Zach) are going to lose time/role to players who have been gifted roles (Giddey, possibly Matas) or who suck, but are the only alternative at their position (Vuc, Smith).
Like, Coby has spent literally years winning the job that AKME just handed to Josh fucking Giddey?
If he's not ok with that, he's not going to be blaming Zach LaVine for it.
Yeah that Coby/Giddey mix is going to be weird. I was falling in love with the Ayo/Coby backcourt, I hope Giddey has some deference in his game.
This is why I don't understand Billy's loyalty to this front office. They have done nothing but give him terrible rosters for five straight years now. I guess the money is worth it.
With that being said, on the off chance Zach comes out on fire and is actively making the Bulls better, I still think they trade him. Both sides are sick of each other. Playing well/winning isn't going to change that.
I don't know! 1st place in the East, you're playing well and you demand a trade? (not going to happen blah blah blah) Winning cures all, but its going to go the other direction anyways. Zach will play, score only moderately efficiently, display all his old baked in negative qualities and be an unattractive trade target while the Bulls will be a .400 team.
ThatsWhatTheMoneyIsFor.png
Like MikeDC (I think) said, I was pretty shocked he didn't take the out to Kentucky, which at least would get him out of the murderous hamster wheel of the Chicago NBA Basketball Franchise.
I think we need to revise the common wisdom around his OKC exit. Seems more likely that rather than him fleeing from a rebuilding team, he probably wanted a massive raise to take the hit to his W/L record, and they told him to go find another sucker.
I think GMs know exactly what Zach LaVine is, and he's of an age that what he is is pretty much all he's gonna be. Proving he's healthy with actual game footage they can watch is probably helpful — again I think most of them can read between the lines about his injury, but there has to be a bit of Ben Simmons-related trepidation about that. So they'd like to see him play but they have doctors that can sort that out (probably).
So I disagree with the idea of him "rehabbing his value." Of course it's better if he's playing 42mpg and ripping the fuck out of the net on an undefeated team. But everyone must understand that if he doesn't play it's because team + player are playing out the string on a very hard transaction to make. (Like it's easy for us to match salaries on the trade machine and press "Ok." Someone who has to pay him what he is owed... that's not an easy thing to do at all. It's also probably pretty hard for Reinsdorf to pay Rui Hachimura and D'Angelo Russell $40 million/year when he'd rather not pay them anything.)
Oh, sure, I don't think Zach ever comes off the bench either. Heck they may use that as pretense to send him home.
I kind of forgot the obvious (and thus most Billy-likely) option which is simply start Ayo at the 3
I read yfBB's argument as speculating that Zach will be sent home to await a trade (or that one will happen before the season starts). Billy being sent to meet with him could be interpreted to mean that things with the front office have really deteriorated badly. We KNOW what Zach thinks of Donovan, and Donovan was still the emissary. He must really fucking hate the guys who gave him that contract lol
Another bit of conjecture: The Lakers have done nothing. Hard to say they've "moved on from Zach" when they haven't made a single transaction that would put a deal on ice. They were active as fuck last year, they suddenly have picks freed up and available for trade but now they're paralyzed. Maybe a Zach deal is awaiting something else. Maybe it's like Harden and the Clippers, where everyone knows there's really only one team pitching but it's stalled over a particular player. (Working against this theory is Karnisovas' track record, where his idea of "negotiation" is saying "ok sure.")
I agree there's probably only one team. But I'm not sure they're still pitching at the moment. And hey, I'm all for a trade happening before the season starts, right now I just don't see it happen.
I googled "zach lavine trade" while looking for any chatter I might have missed and the results were disgusting. Pippen Ain't Easy with the killer headline "Zach Lavine lands with Clippers in blockbuster trade..." (missing from the thumbnail: "proposal"). And I have no idea why anyone was lamenting Sports Illustrated's demise. Sports media is a toilet.
Anyway I'm writing fan fiction for sure.
I think it's likely that LA wants Zach at a really reduced rate - meaning offloading basically Gabe Vincent, D'Angelo Russell, Jarred Vanderbilt, or so, and the Bulls don't want to do that either: because they know that's pretty terrible, or they foolishly think he's worth something more that.
On top of that*, Lakers are over the second apron and can't send out multiple players. So it would add a 3rd team, and I'm not sure AKME has the ability to think that creatively.
*I could be wrong about all of this; i just tried fanspo, but maybe the Lakers have a way of getting out of it.
Few weeks ago Lebron took slightly less money than he could have taken to keep the team under the 2nd apron:
https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/lebron-james-reportedly-takes-slight-pay-cut-to-help-lakers-duck-second-apron-as-he-officially-re-signs/
"When LaVine is traded it’ll be for players with less burdensome contracts , nobody interesting and young enough to demand minutes in this year’s rotation."
Where do I place my bet that when this trade happens and we get nothing in return, K.C. Johnson will give us a tweet saying "Chris Duarte was better in his rookie season than Zach LaVine was in his, so they're basically the same player"?
KC's more likely to say something along the lines of: 'The Bulls were never going to get a great return for trading Zach. AKME did well considering the circumstances'. AKA No Bulls fault.
Since I don't really like the way the threads automatically fold up and make it hard to see the conversation, I'm just gonna start a new one.
Hot take: I would rather have D'Angelo Russell at 1yr/$18.6M than Zach Lavine at 3/$138M.
And I don't think it's even particularly close.
Russell is a year younger, doesn't have the scary injury history, and has been a better 3 point shooter on slightly higher volume.
If I were the Lakers, my best offer (if I were to offer at all) would be
Zach for Rui, Vincent, Vanderbilt, Hood-Schifino, Wood
The Bulls would throw in Bitim, and then have to waive or trade an additional 3 players from our group of flotsam (Carter, Duarte, Craig, Lonzo, Dalen Terry).
A second idea:
Bulls trade Zach, Vuc (to Pelicans)
Bulls get Powell, PJ Tucker (from Clippers), CJ McCollum (from Pelicans)
Pelicans trade Ingram (to Clippers), CJ (to Bulls)
Pelicans get Zach, Vuc (from Bulls), Bones Hyland (from Clippers)
Clippers trade Powell, PJ Tucker, Bones
Clippers get Ingram
For some reason this hard caps every team, which might make it difficult for the Clippers since they're trading away 3 guys and getting only 1 back. Probably they could massage things a little bit to make this work though?
Do I think the Clippers are opportunistic enough to trade that nothing for Ingram? Yep.
Do I think the Pelicans are desperate to trade Ingram? They certainly seem to want to, and at least Zach and Vuc fill theoretical holes in their lineups. And by giving up CJ, I think the money is more or less neutral for them vice what they'd have to pay Ingram.
I dunno. I think if I were them, I'd do it but I'd probably want to get a pick thrown in because I think Ingram is just a better player than Zach. But maybe his contract status precludes that? Beggars can't be choosers.
this actually makes decent sense for all sides
"Beggars can't be choosers."
AK: Hold my beer.
On a more serious note, what would be your endgame for the Bulls with this trade? Basically just try to trade all of them (or at least McCollum and Powell) by the trade deadline? If so, I'd be pretty happy with that.
The endgame is having Vuc gone and getting off Lavine's last year. Sure, try and trade those guys again, but the mission is already accomplished in reality.
I can't see the Pelicans balking at an Ingram contract but taking on Zach. I get that it's far fewer seasons remaining, but they could just let Ingram expire and maybe that's even 'better' than having Zach
Pelicans are legit poor (po' boy, even), so if CJ+Ingram is more for just this season even than LaVine+Vuc, they may be penny wise and worry about the next two years later
I know it's not your point, but it's so crazy to me that Zach doesn't take like 11 threes per game. On this fuckin team, with guys like Vuc and Demar filling up the midrange, they're out there letting Zach just kinda noodle around and do whatever. Zach is a terrific shooter who can get his shot off as easily as anyone in the game. The team needed gonzo shooting from him and they got very good shooting instead.
It never ceases to amaze me that his 3PAr actually went down slightly after DeMar joined the team.
Chris Duarte is the homeless man's Scottie Pippen.