"Meaningless December" doesn't have the same alliteration as March
Checking in on the Bulls, oh look they're slightly below average and long-term hopeless again
Clearly, in part due to the holidays, the Bulls’ season has already reached “See? Nobody Cares” status, and that was when they were winning.
As I said a week and a half ago, I had very little interest in a season reliant on veteran cast-offs producing a 37-win point differential. So little that I won’t even break down the numbers to see if that differential guess was close to accurate during their 5-1 record when the entire playing rotation was healthy.
What’s the point?
An NBA team is never going to be ‘fully healthy’
A team without top-end talent has proven to be just as vulnerable to injury even though depth of 9-10 good players was to obviate that. As Julia Poe wrote today in the Tribune, the Bulls have a typical 2-3 stars and role players model it’s just a lesser version.
All Bulls fans already can hear the lead basketball decision-maker drone on about injuries as an excuse1
6 game samples mean nothing, even less than 20 game samples.
And now, the injuries are back. I’d say that these injuries are to more important players in Josh Giddey and Coby White, but these Bulls have proven that anyone from Isaac Okoro to Zach Collins is critical.
Collins was the first to go, out for Monday’s game that during that contest saw the Bulls lose White early and then Giddey in the 2nd half.
I was preemptively annoyed that we were going to get late, vague prognoses exclusively from Billy Donovan, but I suppose credit to Josh Giddey for raising his status to where Shams is reporting on your injury: his hamstring strain means an absence of “at least a few weeks”.
Coby White received the same ‘tightness’ label as Giddey2 , but while his severity hasn’t been upgraded (yet) it’s the same calf that caused him to miss weeks of training camp and the first 11 games of this year. Calf injuries have been an epidemic around the whole league, and especially a recurring one like this is likely to keep White out weeks as well.
The Bulls got on OK without Coby to start the year, but we knew that was a lot of luck. While he hasn’t shot the ball well from three this year, and overall hasn’t been able to ramp up to shoulder the usage load he should on this offense, I think he’ll be missed. Maybe even moreso on a per-minute basis than Giddey3.
Losing both is going to be likely catastrophic.
But due to this roster’s construction, you can squint and reason perhaps it’s Collins who’ll be missed the most? “When fully healthy” it meant the Bulls had more options to play two bigs, which had success (small sample caveats, of course), AND more importantly meant Patrick Williams barely saw the floor at all.
As Billy Donovan was saying during the worst of it, it’s critical to the Bulls success on the court this season that they limit the floor time of Arturas Karnisovas draftees, save Ayo Dosunmu and maybe Matas Buzelis half the time4. Billy was enacting that philosophy when everyone returned, destroying the tank to get back to ‘competitive’ by making sure none of these dudes played too much, or in some cases at all. To fill in for Giddey and Coby, The Bulls have plenty of ballhandlers on the roster to where I don’t think Dalen Terry or Julian Phillips need to play at all.
Not to repeat myself, especially with such a long time between posts, but: none of these games matter.
Giddey isn’t around, and he’s pretty critical to any evaluation
Coby won’t have opportunity to improve his trade value
Billy is not interested - and his bosses are OK with this and have been for years - in throwing minutes at young players for the sake of development
All that does matter is off the court, and that’s whether the front office can self-assess accurately as sellers and have a productive trade deadline. They should’ve had this realization in September, but as we know they are prone to wild swings in perception, because, well: they’re not good at their jobs. So I fully expect those 6 games when fully healthy sticking with them far more than how bad they’re likely to look these next couple of weeks.
Unless, I suppose if Coby and Collins are back soon and they can do OK enough without Giddey…also doesn’t change anything fundamental, but it will change front office spin (another reason to not do much).
And if the likely path occurs of it all going pretty poorly, I am not convinced there is any depth of record that won’t still have the Bulls thinking they are in the hunt for the postseason. And remember when we were healthy we won games, and can get back there as long as everyone is healthy.
also 100% guaranteed we hear “Josh was All-Star to us”
on the official Bulls Injury Report that the league mandates. As I said when that was released, it wasn’t “good news” as KC Johnson inferred, but that the Bulls weren’t being transparent
Not to discredit Giddey, as “starter quality” is better than I thought he would be and he’d proven to be that level this season
I’m just talking pure production, not talent or upside