Josh Giddey tries to generate leverage against team that doesn't understand the word

a restricted free agency update, which by its nature is not much

It’s been a long many weeks of Bulls ‘full roster’ statis where the only pending matter is how much to overpay Josh Giddey to return to the team.

I will give the Bulls some credit, they did not do the total dumbass thing I expected them to: proactively jump the market when the market simply doesn’t exist.

In the interim time, there’s been a lot of discussion but not much news or even rumor. My daily obsession has been listening and then getting mad at Chuggo (what a great summer!), and also for some similar self-defeating reason caring what Bulls state media has to say.

What we hadn’t heard, at all, was that another team was actually interested in acquiring Giddey.

Until now! Jake Fischer is second-tier in the rumormonger space, but it is not nothing that we can now link to an actual rumor of another actual team actually wanting Josh Giddey.

In this video, Fischer says the Warriors 'and 3 East teams' have talked to Giddey and his representation about a sign-and-trade. But they haven’t gotten very far, including apparently to the point where we can know any dollar/years figure on the contract, because: other teams are reticent to deal with the Bulls! Not just because of their professed desire to retain Giddey, but because in general their motivations and actions are so inscrutable it makes them hard to work with.

This is not the first time we’ve heard about league-wide perception ragging on the Bulls front office, and as Fischer emphasizes this is not (just) reporters but other teams saying this.

While, like I said, this is not nothing, I am dubious with how serious the Giddey interest is if there’s been no movement from the Bulls. Fischer reiterates the long-standing figure of ~$20M average annual value offered, so perhaps these other teams aren’t offering more beyond that else you’d think Giddey would be able to apply more pressure to get out of town to get paid.

Though perhaps they have tried to use this interest, but they’re dealing with total morons who have proven to not understand things like ‘leverage’ or ‘value’ in their transactions history. So the next step is to go outside the negotiation with the Bulls, talk to reporters and say “we’re trying, but what can you say about these doofuses?”

Also important to note that it’s very likely the Brooklyn Nets aren’t one of the interested teams, as they could generate enough cap space to throw Giddey an offer sheet and get around the unpleasantness of talking to Arturas Karnisovas or Marc Eversley on the phone.

I don’t know how this will end. I was wrong in predicting it’d be some July 4th news dump where the Bulls pay Giddey $27M and try and spin it as a win-win to only pay him ~$10M more than he’s worth based on a couple months of unsustainable shooting against checked-out competition.

But I do think that is what will eventually happen. All they have (and it was enough to get a contract extension from a fellow doofus) is their bullshit late-season surge, and Giddey was a big part of that.