What the SummerBulls showed us
1 up, 2 down
Brief recap and discussion jumping-off of 2026 Summer League. There is technically one more game on Friday - Wilson is confirmed to not be playing but I’m less clear on the rest - but I am posting this now!
Caleb Wilson
Wilson put up consistent production through his 4 Summer League games, though never again reaching the heights of his debut. Finished with 23.5 points on 50% shooting (42% from three), 7.3 rebounds, 1.3 steals, 2.5 blocks.
In his final game versus the SummerLakers, Wilson overall played, per John Hollinger, “kinda brutal”. Yet Wilson was still able to generate a three-and-dunk combo highlight:
Here is our old friend Ricky at old site SBNation on Wilson’s change in shot profile.
A study by Owen Phillips showed that three-point rate (percentage of field goal attempts from three) is the “stickiest” stat of summer league — the one that carries over the best to the regular season. Well, Wilson moved his three-point rate from 9.1% at UNC to 47.1% for the Summer Bulls.
As Ricky emphasizes, it’s exciting to see this kind of dramatic improvement so quickly as it potentially indicates how eager and driven Wilson is to improve as a player. It’s something Wilson certainly talks about as very important to him, and very cool to see it on the court in the initiation of his Bulls career.
Another area of improvement for Wilson, as Ricky relays, is his playmaking. The assist-to-turnover ratio went backwards in SummerLeague versus college.
As Will Gottlieb of CHGO concurs, this Summer League was a resounding success for Wilson:
Caleb's highlights per 36 might lead the league. Super productive. Shot is a real weapon.
But he's got a ton of work to do: attention to detail, patience, consistency, strength, handle all need to improve.
He's already good, and still has a lot of room left to grow
Dailyn Swain
Here’s a the Dailyn Swain highlight of Thursday’s game:
Unfortunately that was pretty much it for Swain, his lone field goal and across 4 games he shot 4-31 from the field. Swain was moved off the ball more as the SL went on, but that relative lack of responsibility hasn’t helped.
Bust?!?! No, not yet, but being bad in Summer League is worse than being good. Would it have helped Swain if the Bulls deployed a ‘pure’ point guard on his squad? Maybe, but only helped him look good in these games this year. I can see the argument that for his long-term development he should be tasked with more responsibility, not less.
Noa Essengue
Speaking of responsibilities, it looks like while Swain is given opportunity to fail, Noa Essengue has already lost trust from the new administration that did not draft him. Essengue went from starting, to off the bench in the second half, to being the 8th man playing 11 minutes (and committing 7 fouls in that time!) on Thursday.
Was that deserved? Hollinger thinks there’s some bias working against him.
hasn't been amazing but there's also some Not Our Guy syndrome happening.
One can squint and see positives in the minutes he was on the floor, but it appears that Tiago Splitter, who was the one directly benching him in that second game and remained in Vegas even though no longer head coach of the SummerBulls, doesn’t like the cut of Essengue’s jib. I’m speculating a bit, but it is likely a combination of subjective body language and objective body-on-the-ground that has Splitter believing Essengue is simply not physically ready for the NBA.
Looking like the GLeague for Noa Essengue in his second season, which is not too negative a position given his significant injury and significantly young age (he’s younger than both Swain and Wilson).
I don’t have an opinion on Jaylin Sellers and Tobe Awaka, the two 2-way contracts on the roster. I’d just like to remind everyone that if Sellers is looking productive in Summer League and (likely) on the GLeague roster, he’s helped by being 3 and a half years older than Essengue.
Nate Duncan said (latest SL prospects review) Swain was the worst Summer League performer he's ever seen. I don't remember if he included caveats like 'in person' or 'first round' (probably the latter at least)
On the plus side, said that Sellers was as good as any second round pick
Also, my general philosophy.
The Bulls have been given an amazing gift, and to not squander it, they need to cut out their sleepy, small-time business as usual bullshit. Post haste.
It's not hard. Stacey King wasn't wrong, it's a simple game at heart. You want guys who complement each other and don't get in each other's way much. Our best guy is Caleb, so everyone else needs to conform and complement him.
And there's no reason to be slow about it. The clock is ticking. And to add to that, does Caleb Wilson sound like the kind of dude that needs a lot of "veteran mentorship" or like the kind of guy who's going to be happy with the team just doing the typical half-assed Bulls approach as evidenced by let's simultaneously "rebuild" and trade away draft picks for cash? That is a rhetorical question. He does not.
What does that mean? Look at Jason Tatum. That's the closest analog for who Caleb can be as an NBA player. 30 usage, ball dominant combo forward.
This season should be devoted to pushing him as far as he can toward that. Everything on the team needs to be pushing towards
1) Giving Caleb every opportunity to reach that potential
2) Putting the best players around Caleb to fit with this fully realized version of what he will be.
We need to be ruthless about churning through guys who don't fit and complement him.
I'm going to start by saying Josh Giddey should be gone soon. There are some people who think he'd be a good fit. I don't see it.
Why is Giddey a bad fit?
1) It's not even the defense, it's that in a half court offense, if the ball is in Caleb's hands, Giddey does nothing for you.
Now, some people are going to complain about this. But the Ball doesn't always need to be in Caleb's hands. No, it doesn't. But that's the default, the top priority, and our default mode of evaluation should be that the player can do something positive to complement Caleb when Caleb has the ball. What I'm saying is, the secondary players who might be primary players have to be capable of contributing without the ball in their hands.
Giddey was traded to the Bulls for several reasons, but the fact that he was unable and/or unwilling to be a secondary guy is clearly one of them.
2) Next, for the time that Giddey does have the ball in his hands, is he even the right kind of point guard to set up a guy like Caleb? In transition yes, but I don't care about that because I care about building a championship team and when I talk, I'm talking about a half court offense. Because a championship team needs that. I don't want to build a team for the regular season. I want a team that wins playoff games.
What kind of half-court point guard is Giddey? Well, first Giddey hasn't even consistently been the half-court point guard for the Bulls much of the time he's been here. When it was crunch time, that fell to Coby or Tre Jones. Why? Because Giddey is not a good half-court creator. But his style of creation is mainly to try and drive and collapse the defense, then kick it out to shooters. So, classically, he'd come down and, say, Coby, Matas, and Vuc would create space and he'd go to work.
Now, Caleb could maybe create this space, but he's also a great cutter and driver himself. Fundamentally, Giddey is going to operate in that space as well though.
Contrast that to a PG whose primary threat is that he'll just pull up and shoot. Obviously everyone switches it up and some guys are dual threats, but I'm talking about as their bread and butter. That sort of PG works by, himself, creating gravity as a shooter, and thus opening up the lane for other guys to have means of attack.
It's obvious that this is the sort of guy you'd ideally pair up with a top level athletic forward like Caleb.
Giddey was something like 70th in the league in pull ups last year per game. And he was something like 70th in the league as far as eFG% on those shots.
In summary, Giddey is a poor fit. The ideal PG (beyond that fact that Caleb should really be the de-facto PG) offensively is a Pritchard or Derrick White or taking it up a notch, Jamal Murray or Jalen Brunson. In short, we want a shooting heavy PG not a driving heavy PG.