Vuc is Bulls and Bulls are Vuc

should be no surprise "our constant" is back for another Bulls run

It would’ve been more timely to talk Nikola Vucevic last month, when he was in the barren part of the NBA news calendar getting ready to compete in Eurobasket for his native Montenegro’s national team.

But that’s the thing, it’s always timely to talk Vuc. Because he is always here and never going anywhere. There will be another training camp next month where there’s a story about how Vuc is still here, and he sacrificed so much to be on this bad team, and many are saying not give Vuc the ball more?

I think this is only surprising to credulous beat reporters, who were somehow dogwalked by Arturas Karnisovas, the biggest dumbass in pro basketball, in the wake of another bad-or-at-least-incomplete trade deadline where they all wrote with very similar language that it wasn’t a complete failure that the Bulls couldn’t trade Vucevic when he was shooting out of his mind out of nowhere at age 34.

KC Johnson at the house organ: “Bulls have had a lot of talks surrounding Nikola Vucevic. There will be plenty of groundwork for offseason move.”

ESPN’s Jamal Collier: “Although Chicago stood pat on any additional moves, the team believes it laid the groundwork for a trade in the offseason, sources said.”

Joe Cowley, tough-guy dipshit, at the Chicago Sun Times (still, somehow): “The Bulls did come away from the trade deadline feeling good about the groundwork laid down for the summer.”

It’s hard to overstate how inept the collective local beat is, but some of this shared perspective where the Bulls inability to trade Vucevic is anything but a failure is also due to their personal biases: they simply like Vuc. He is a good quote, dependable on and off the court. That leads all reporters to believe Vucevic is better, let alone more valuable, than the league is indicating.

There was a Chuggo episode this month - for some reason they do 5 podcasts a week ALL YEAR - about some frivolous HoopHype center ranking where Vuc was ranked 13th. And somehow the episode wasn’t about how this is a preposterously high rank. HoopsHype had Vuc over players the other team would never trade (not even considering contract) for: Porzingis, Reid, Hartenstein, Duren, Lively, Lopez, Kessler. There were other teams listed that the team wouldn’t want Vuc for even if he is likely to have a better season than their incumbent, because they are young and/or bench players.

You know who else never goes away? Me! And I don’t have to look that far back to spell out why Vuc has low trade value and why the Bulls trade MO makes any Vucevic trade impossible.

It all goes to the how these two entities are aligned: Vuc is a slightly below average player on a team whose mission statement is to win a slightly below average amount of games this year.

Vucevic could be on a different team if the Bulls goals were something beyond the quest for Eastern Conference 9th place in the 2025-26 season. Some salary swap to help a team in an apron crunch (Bulls still ~$16M under the Luxury Tax line¹), or a buyout allowing Vuc to escape to join an actually-competitive team for the minimum.

These would be moves where you don’t receive a minutes-in-this-regular-season replacement, and the Bulls are not interested in that.

So it really is no surprise that Vuc is here for another season. The AKME front office, at every turn from when he was acquired up until and including this summer, has praised him and treated him like a superstar. He’s not one, of course, but he is the Bulls version of one.

1. aka: their hard cap