the Bulls consistency has been volatility

and why does Arturas Karnisovas keep bringing up "home court advantage"?

You’re always going to have a tough schedule when you’re one of the worst teams in the league, but even with that in mind the Bulls’ opening stretch is pretty rough and continues as such this week.

So it’s not entirely fair to glean any trends from results, when their opponents and circumstances have had such variety:

1. A Pelicans team without Zion Williamson in New Orleans

2. The Bucks - who are supposed to be good, but lost to the Bulls pretty handily in their home opener and then 2 days later lost to the Brooklyn Nets, so maybe not?

3. The Thunder, a Western Conference contender, on a back to back.

These kind of caveats can be put forth in every game and you’d have a case that it is so variable that it’s hard not to just accept it and ignore it as to not render any analysis as meaningless.

Which makes it all too weirder that the guy in charge of analyzing the Bulls and making decisions, Arturas Karnisovas, believes in the power of “home court advantage”.

AK tried to sneak some PR practice before hibernation by going on the radio before the home opener on Saturday night, in a bit of an afterglow of that win over the Bucks. He was his usual noncommittal and banal self, but that made it all the more strange that again one of his few definitive statements was about playing better at home?

“I would like to establish home-court advantage. It’s been really hard for our guys to play in this building and I’m not sure why.”

Every word in that sentence makes it dumber. It is tempting, but I won’t go into a long diatribe to describe why it’s a dumb thing to care about, if it’s even true, how strange it is you admit you don’t know how to fix it…

As I have such low expectations for the guy, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that he was told by ownership that they’d like to win more games at home (for the sake of their fans patrons), and he is just repeating it because he read as much in some middle-manager-for-dummies strategy.

Of course, because his team isn’t that good no matter where they play, they got throttled in that home opener, for the 4th time in 5 Billy Donovan seasons. It was also notable, if told to care about “home court”, that the Bulls got booed in that game, and Will Perdue at CHGO said he noticed “a lot of empty seats and empty suites”.¹

But, again, that’s discussing results in the face of a lot of caveats of this early-season schedule. What about process? AK also reiterated another preseason point of his that they want to establish an identity of being faster paced and shooting more from three.

And through Saturday night’s matchups, the Bulls are 1st in the league in pace, and 5th in three point attempt rate. But the huge difference in the results is the make percentage of those threes, and turnovers.

Wins: 44.7% from three, 9.2% turnover percentage

Losses: 28.7% from three, 21.1% turnover percentage

So the Bulls, so far are practicing what they preach, even if they themselves don’t know why they want to do this, what the goal of it is (“identity” is not a goal in and of itself) as they won’t say whether they want to be good or not.

Because while this wasn’t stated, they do seem to want to still lean into their faded All-Stars of Zach LaVine and Nikola Vucevic.

LaVine has been ok, not enough to increase his trade value but does look healthy. And if trying to look deeper (so, Bulls aren’t interested but perhaps trade suitors are) he does look to be playing in a more plan-fitting fashion. Career-high 45% of his attempts are from three. And 60% of his makes are assisted, where in his Bulls career it’s been in the low 40%s pretty consistently.

But with this many turnovers (24.2% individual turnover percentage, needless to say a career-high as that is get-out-of-the-league bad) you can’t help but think he’s still the same old Zach LaVine, basketball’s version of the Peter Principle.

And with Vuc, it’s more just viscerally annoying than actually true. He’s usually in the top few players in terms of field goal attempts per game, which hurts to see. But that FGA number will always be a bit inflated because he plays a lot of minutes² and he so rarely draws free throw attempts. In terms of usage percentage he is sub-20% which would be down to when he first entered the league, and below his backup Jalen Smith. Vuc’s also shooting better, while keeping a relatively low volume he is making over half after hitting below 30% last year. But I think I speak for a lot of fans when I’m just sick of seeing Vuc, so any usage seems too high.

Altogether, and just through three contests, the Bulls do look to be establishing a style of play. But their ‘identity’ is also tied to who plays³. While it’s notable that vet role players (and notable AK free agent work of years’ past) Jevon Carter and Torrey Craig, are out of the rotation, Matas Buzelis is barely getting any action outside of garbage time. They’re carving out time for the Lonzo comeback tour. LaVine and Vuc still play a lot, and take a lot of posessions when they do play.

I don’t believe that them playing negates the other goals of the season, but it does mitigate things a bit.

1. oh, and maybe all the more important to bring fans to see the game in-person since they can’t watch it on TV.

2. and what can be done about that, I ask you?!? Less Vuc? You try telling Vuc there will be less Vuc! He’s a made man in this town!

3. also, and this is anecdotal, but a “young and hungry team” wouldn’t let so many loose balls go unclaimed this early in the season, right?