The BlogABull draft lottery post: it's, uh, a lottery
deserve's got nothing to do with it
I am very against tanking, and especially the discourse around it. One silver lining to the Bulls sending out a bunch of first round picks was at least we wouldn’t have to hear about it.
At least that was the hope, whoops.
The Bulls traded away their 2023 first round pick with top-4 protection (master negotiator, that Arturas Karnisovas) at the 2021 trade deadline. Surely by now they’d be a playoff team so the odds in their lottery slot wouldn’t be a concern….
And really, they still shouldn’t have been a concern. But indeed there were people in April saying “well they could’ve improved their chances of keeping the pick from 8% to 13% if they crashed the team plane, and that’s just negligence otherwise!”.
And I understand all too well that what we got instead in the PatBev era was useless, even potentially harmful given AK’s gullibility towards late regular season stats. But that indicates a broader concern that is remediated by the lead executive getting fired, not any small steps they could’ve realistically taken. Like they were never going to tell DeRozan to sit out games. I still hear bellyaching about the year Sean Kilpatrick got the Bulls a win hurting their lottery odds. While it did spawn the fantastic nickname of “Kill-draft-pick”, it never made sense: that fringe dude was the tanking maneuver!
Now, the Bulls did screw up at the end of the regular season after they already wrapped up their play-in seed, but that was extremely minor and like the Kilpatrick signing probably wouldn’t have “worked” anyway. You’re never tanking in a vacuum, there are other teams against and around you.
I guess my point is this nickel and diming around draft position is a lot of wasted thought and energy. If you genuinely believe in tanking as a franchise-building strategy, that has to be done early, and heavy. The Bulls indicated they weren’t going that route when trading future first round picks, there was no ‘soft tank’ to be done this year that’d have garnered anything significant.
So all that dumb talk addressed, I can move on to something even dumber: someone predicting a chance outcome?
Much less dumb, though only because I believe most are doing it ironically, is the idea of which franchise “deserves” to win: whether that’s due to vibes of the team or prior lottery luck/unluck.
No, this isn’t that complicated or contains any deeper meaning: like their shot profile, the Bulls lottery odds are a math problem: 8.5% chance of it landing in the top-4 (and keeping the selection), and 1.8% chance of landing the number one overall pick and taking Victor Wembanyama.
I mean…we all know that even if the Bulls win the lottery tonight that Wemby will get hurt a lot. But that will be less of a Bulls curse and more because giants struggle to stay on NBA courts. It’d still be an excellent result, obviously.
Landing numbers #2-#4 wouldn’t be quite as seismic, and actually would bring up choices for franchise direction that I don’t trust AK to make (and if you agree, you also think he should be fired now), but undeniably a good thing.
The official BlogABull prediction, with over 77% certainty , is that the Bulls get the #11 selection and send it to the Magic.
One of the worst telecasts in all of entertainment begins at 7pm Central. Luckily we will know very quickly if the Bulls jump into the top-4 and keep their pick. If you don’t see their name (or I guess the Magic would get announced?) after #11, you have to sit through 15 minutes of commercials and bullshit.
But at least talk about it here?
Here are some dudes that might be available cheap (I put that in as a keyword so hopefully it floats to the top of Chicago's radar):
1. Terrence Davis - Former undrafted FA, has shown a really good stroke in Sacramento but basically duplicated Kevin Huerter and Malik Monk. Made $4 million last year, I can't imagine he will make more.
2. Robert Covington - I would love to plunder the Clippers roster, they have so many guys who duplicate each other (see where I'm going with this?) Covington is 32 and barely played at all. He has one year $11 million left, they would surely like to dump him based upon Lue never playing him, not sure what they would offer up. If it's Bones Hyland, I would run to Los Angeles to get their signature - there's like a 20% chance that guy is caught stealing Jolly Ranchers from a convenience store and an equal chance he becomes a wild, rollercoaster, fun NBA player. LA has like 5 guys on the roster who largely duplicate the strengths and flaws of the players ahead of them in the rotation. Vuc sign-and-trade destination?
3. Keita Bates-Diop - HOME IN THE AREA ALERT, but he's the wrong age (27) for a guy scrapping for minutes on a bad team to show up on people's radars. He shot the ball well, which might be a mirage, but you can likely get him for nothing.
4. Kris Dunn - KIDDING, the Bulls would never do this. I think he belongs in the NBA, though, and you cannot ignore the fact that he ate shit on 10 day contracts to work his way back and seems to have worked on several of his flaws. I don't think he's ever going to shoot 47% from 3 again (!) but 35% is not out of the realm of possibility. He is basically Denis Schroder if used correctly. Should be able to get him for $3 million tops.
5. Yuta Watanabe - Again, he's too old and his game looks weird, but the guy can shoot and he made the minimum last year. Brooklyn has no incentive to pass on him - I would definitely not bid them out of contention - but they have a roster in total chaos, are probably not getting rid of Joe Harris' last year, so he might get squeezed by a numbers game.
6. Bol Bol - This guy had the craziest year. He's under contract for almost nothing but you have to imagine his agent is trying to find somewhere he can play, which is likely not in Orlando. If you can't use a guy with these weird skills I don't think much of your coaching. Another Orlando oddball under contract is Chuma Okeke, who is still raw and (I think) undercoached, his offensive skills are Matisse Thybulle-level bad but his defense has been Matisse Thybulle-level good. He was injured this year and had no minutes when he returned since Orlando has like 85 power forwards. Here's a defensive highlight reel from 2022, these things are by definition cherrypicked but you can see how fast his hand-speed is and why he could be a serious disruptor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukzrcdqh34g
7. Jaxson Hayes - Basically the second coming of JaVale McGee. That's good and that's bad. For what I'd want to pay him, that'd be good.
EDIT: I didn't notice this but I think a common thread here is I'm hoping to capitalize upon other teams developing talent and not having room for them, since the Bulls seem largely unwilling to do this!
Gonna be painful to watch AK inevitably comment sometime this off-season something to the effect of "We got knocked out by the eventual Eastern Conference champs, so we're not that far off!"