Lonzo Ball trade ends brief life of the 'patiently stupid' Bulls, back to 'aggressively stupid'

they are so bad at trades!

You could say that the pre-Free Agency trade the Bulls just made works ‘in a vacuum’, because like a vacuum this trade sucks!

Almost exactly a year after an extremely similar deal which gifted the Oklahoma City Thunder their final championship piece in Alex Caruso, the Bulls made an extremely similar (but lower stakes) trade on Saturday sending Lonzo Ball to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Isaac Okoro.

And like that Caruso deal, cue the Anakin/Padme meme: …plus draft capital, right?

one of my go-to AK demerits: this was his response to someone asking why no draft picks in the Caruso trade return. A literal shrug.

nope!

This trade, the latest teardown transaction¹ , is another example of AKME’s failings: it’s not merely that they don’t value draft picks, they do not understand the concept of value.

Reminder, and I don’t blame anyone for not paying attention enough to remember all this: after a comeback success story that was deemed by this dumb blogger as impossible and pointless, Lonzo Ball actually had trade value again as the Bulls approached the deadline. But instead of trading him for a very good package in return (where most of the value was in taking on ‘bad money’, but still) the Bulls instead gave him a somewhat-modest contract extension, and I’m using the qualifier ‘somewhat’ because Lonzo proceeded to not play for the Bulls again because of a months-long absence due to a recurring wrist injury.

At the time, this extension was described, mostly by people who work for and/or are being told this by the Bulls, as ‘very tradeable’. Perhaps it could net them a first round pick in the future!

But wait, didn’t they just turn down a first round pick at the deadline? And getting zero picks now is certainly worse value, right? Not to the Bulls, because, again: they have no idea what ‘value’ means, and how players are just one type of asset a team has to use in transactions.

Don’t worry, the Bulls also don’t understand basketball teams! And Isaac Okoro is a good case study in this failing. Okoro does fit in some ways: he has true wing size and is as defensive-first player. He is getting incrementally better on offense as he did hit more open three-pointers, but still takes far too low of a volume, especially when defended (zero NBA-defined ‘contested’ attempts all season). He is about to enter his age 25 season, and has been durable so far in his career.

But one stat from last year most accurately encapsulates Okoro current value: nine. As in: there were nine players ahead of him in Cleveland’s full playoff rotation last year. Okoro shares this stat with Giddey, who was not on the floor in OKC’s 2024 playoff run.

If you want to desperately try to find a positive in this one-for-one swap, as our old friend Ricky put it: “Okoro’s playoff limitations don't matter because the Bulls don't make the playoffs.”

So let’s play this out: these trades could be seen as an unintentional, back-asswards play where the Bulls embrace their lowly ambitions, signaling they are not interested in “16-game players” when they can get “82-game players” to fulfill their organizational goal of ‘competitive every night, especially at home’ and maybe making the top 8 seeds of the-by-far-lower conference. Due to age and durability differences, Okoro, though flawed, is an adequate 82-game player, whereas Cleveland will likely bubble-wrap Lonzo Ball for a deep playoff run.

But even after interpreting this strange-to-the-point-of-irony motivation for the Bulls, that would only explain the logic of this trade if it was with a team besides the Cavaliers.

Because, no, these trades can’t be judged without context, and in this case there’s an extremely important point of context: the Cavaliers desperately wanted to get off of Okoro’s contract, as they are into the second apron for this coming season and Okoro’s deal extends another season after that.

This was published less than two weeks ago:

For Cleveland, the coming weeks will involve difficult evaluations of players like Isaac Okoro, whose market value appears questionable.

“From everything that I’m told, they’re having a hard time finding anybody that has legitimate interest in Isaac Okoro, unless Isaac also comes with some kind of sweetener from the caps, some kinds of assets attached to his contract,” Fedor stated.

Similar discussions are happening around Dean Wade, as the front office attempts to create financial flexibility for potential contracts for Ty Jerome and Sam Merrill.

To put it simply, there are two theoretical transactions at work here:

1. The Cavaliers needing to attach assets to get a team to take Isaac Okoro’s contract

2. The Bulls gaining an asset for trading Lonzo Ball to a team on his ‘very tradeable’ contract

How in the hell do these two theoretical transactions get combined in practice, and the Bulls get no additional assets???

(it’s a rhetorical question: AKME is stupid and bad at their jobs)

Will Gottlieb² nailed it at CHGO in his bafflement over how the Bulls spent all of a few months indicating that they were going to change their approach, and build this team with pragmatism and internal development or whatever looking to the summer of 2026 as a time where they can strike with a ton of cap flexibility. It was a cynical and borderline-insulting ethos that they weren’t fully committing to³, but it was plausibly better than what they had been doing the past three years. Even I bought into it a little bit, thinking they were not going to be able to trade Lonzo because they overvalued him, not thinking they’d so undervalue him as to make it a no-brainer deal for the Cavs.

And merely days after Marc Eversley said all that, they do this trade that gains a low-upside older player an actually-good team deemed expendable⁴ who has a contract going into 2026-27 (joining Jalen Smith and Patrick Williams in a truly grim cohort).

Sure, if looking without prejudgment, this is merely a trade of a couple role players who have relatively small contracts and the Bulls got the younger one. But there is no way to judge Bulls trades without negative bias. AKME has proven time and time again, and to a startlingly-high degree, that they do not know what they are doing. And so while this trade could be seen as merely objectively bad but not a big problem, in the context of their reign - just extended years into the future! - of terror against Bulls fans, it is much much worse.

1. Luckily for AK, his boss doesn’t think that’s part of the job to be evaluated. He still has one remaining in Nikola Vucevic

2. this trade is a solid barometer for who to take seriously when it comes to analyzing the Bulls. The people who are trying to justify it seem to have high correlation with the people who have typical dogshit Bulls opinions

3. Will said it very well on their trade analysis podcast: even if you don’t value draft picks, at least recognize that other NBA teams do! Bulls especially don’t care about second rounders, but they could use them to dump Jevon Carter or the now especially-superfluous Dalen Terry.

4. per KC Johnson at Bulls PR, moving Ball could mean retaining 25 year old Tre Jones!