Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

The Bulls are a contender. Here's Why.

Good morning Chicago…

Grab your coffee and let’s send you into the new year with some optimism.

I’m sitting here thinking about two things: how goddamn good it is to be a Bulls fan right now and how goddamn funny it is that my roommate’s girlfriend gave him wrapping paper and tape so that he could wrap the presents he got for her.

And I guess one other thing: if we could harness the collective energy that’s spent when 50-year-old-plus men see traveling violations go uncalled in the NBA, how many world issues could be solved?

Take world hunger, for example. The most impoverished countries’ children would be eating ribeyes and parmesan-crusted Brussels sprouts for lunch every day.

Men, we take a step forward then jump right back a couple steps.

But if there’s two things that you can count on us for, it’s: yelling BALL when a fumble is loose on a football field and yelling HE TRAVELLED when a 6-foot-8 man dribbles through the lane at 17 miles per hour.

But this Bulls team, they don’t take steps back at all these days, do they? Every game I’m ready for a letdown, and thus far, it just hasn’t come. We had a couple of COVID-related losses, but outside of those, we’ve won 9 out of the 11 last games.

That’s five wins in a row for the first time since 2017, and the Bulls actually sucked then too. Outside of that random run, the Bulls have not seen this kind of success since Tom Thibodeau left — now six years ago.

That’s half of high school and all of college, or if you were dedicated to the grind (meaning not dedicated at all), maybe just one, long, enjoyable college stint.

Taking in every game has been a real treat, a masters class in how to put a team together and how to make all the players work on the floor so they’re greater than the sum of their parts.

DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine are each averaging over 25 points per game this season. To put into context what that means — without doing a ton of research at 12:30 am — that would put them in the company of teammates like Durant/Curry, Kyrie/Lebron, Wade/ LeBron, Shaq/Kobe, Bird/McHale, and West/Baylor.

That’s 12 hall of famers and LaVine/DeRozan, brother.

Each is doing it on around 60% true shooting, which is a stat that essentially takes into account all aspects of efficient shooting — free throws, three pointers, and regular field goals.

That puts both in the top 35 in that statistic in the league, and the majority of the rest of that class is made up of big men who traditionally take very high-percentage shots, and then guys like Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, and other sharp shooting role players.

The key is that both guys are taking on a significant load, but it’s not an overbearing one. And there’s a very fine line there.

Because they have each other — and a team made up of Nikola Vucevic and other really good role players — they’re not pressured into taking bad shots, or too many shots.

LaVine’s statistics this year are nearly exactly where they were last year — something we were told could not be done — and all the while, he’s averaging almost a full less turnover per game.

DeRozan, meanwhile, is having the best year of his career at age 32 — averaging 27 points on 60% true shooting, with the highest three-point percentage of his career.

Do you ever watch a game, see DeRozan make a midrange jump shot, and think, ‘Man, I’ve never seen him miss one of those’? You’re not alone.

He is shooting over 55% on shots from 10-14 feet, which is his sweet spot.

Out of players that have attempted at least 50 (about 1.5 attempts per game) shots from that area this season, he has the second-best shooting percentage. The first is Jrue Holiday, but here’s the caveat: Holiday has only attempted 51 such shots, while DeRozan has shot 123. He’s made 68 of them.

Kevin Durant, who is rightfully considered a midrange musician, is shooting at a 5% lower clip than DeRozan in that area and has attempted 159 of them.

Back that up to 15-19 feet, and DeRozan is still in the top 10 of the league, shooting nearly at a 50% clip in that area. He’s taken nearly double the shots of almost everyone ahead of him in that category, too.

What you can take from this is two things: that DeRozan is a bona fide All-Star and that when Bill Wennington talks about how DeRozan is defying analytics by taking these shots, he’s talking out of his ass.

Any nerd with a calculator and a deep-rooted hate for people that can actually make such a jumper would tell you that’s a desirable shot — but only when shot by DeRozan and a few of his peers on those lists. DeRozan makes his money in the middle.

In contrast, where LaVine makes his money is at the basket — he shoots about 68% from less than 5 feet, only topped by centers and two former MVPs in LeBron and Giannis (guys much larger than him) — and behind the arc. He’s one of the 30 best three-point shooters in the NBA.

That’s what we call style diversity.

There’s little to no redundancies in Bulls lineups this year, which only a few other teams can say: I’d argue those are the Nets, Suns, and Warriors. In other words, the best teams in the league — which the Bulls are one of now.

Lonzo Ball, by the way, is also one of the most efficient three-point shooters in the NBA. In the top 35, Ball and LaVine are two of only a few players who attempt at least seven threes per game. In other words, they’re taking a lot of them, and they’re making a lot of them. That equals extreme value.

Since LaVine returned from the COVID list, he is shooting 62% from the field and averaging 29 points and 6.3 assists per game. He’s also shooting 62%(!) from behind the three-point line.

I wrote in Tuesday’s newsletter about how the Bulls were adjusting game in, game out. For instance, DeRozan had 10 assists the other night with Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso both out.

Well, last night, Coby White had 12 assists. His previous season high had been 3.

Meanwhile, Ayo Dosunmu again made Trae Young’s life harder. In Monday’s game, Young was virtually useless when guarded by the rookie. Last night, he blocked him three more times.

He was also picking up Trae Young full court at times, as Steph Noh pointed out below, which was bothersome for a scorer who would have needed one of his best career games to beat the Bulls Wednesday.

Steph Noh @StephNoh

Love this strategy from interim Bulls coach Chris Fleming. Seen a bunch of different Bulls (mostly Javonte Green and Ayo Dosunmu) guarding Trae Young with an extremely deep pick-up point throughout the game. Hawks are short-handed, they're trying to tire him out.

Ayo’s emergence this season calls for a tip of the cap to the front office. Where Chicagoans were happy either because he was an Illini alum or from the city generally, others weren’t so sure. Now, he means so much to this team’s future.

Where some see the Bulls as a team that has lost a lot of first-round draft capital to acquire (top-end) players, others see that hitting on Ayo in the second round of the draft essentially wipes out the fact that the Bulls did not have a first-round draft pick this past year. Could they have gotten a better player with higher upside had they had their own pick? Sure.

They also wouldn’t have Vuc, who has had three straight 15 point-15 rebound games. And meanwhile, Ayo is already a legitimate role player on the second-best team in the East, which is historically rare.

In addition to Ayo, the Bulls front office deserves immense credit for picking up the right guys as players fell to COVID protocols over the last month.

At this point, teams are scrambling for bodies. Players you’ve never heard of — hell, that some GMs have never heard of — are getting minutes for teams. At the same time, the Bulls found a permanent player from a 10-day contract (Alfonzo McKinnie) as well as Tyler Cook, who they converted into a two-way player from a 10-day one earlier this season. Cook had a great game last night, and had he not been moved to a two-way deal (half belonging to the G-League team and half to the NBA team), he would have undoubtedly been snatched up during this frenzy.

It’s also a certainty that guys like McKinnie would not have been available later in the COVID surge when more NBA teams needed hardship players, so in that way, the Bulls are lucky they had an outbreak earlier than others.

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The Bulls could be a move away, and they have the flexibility to make that move.

It’s likely those moves, league-wide, will come later in January. As of right now, every team’s cap — and play, frankly — is thrown off by the COVID surge. When that subsides, the dust will settle and the available players will come into focus.

But let’s take a step back before we get there and enjoy what has come together here.

Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley were hired in April of last year.

Instead of being led by Jim Boylen, the Bulls now have Billy Donovan, acting head coach Chris Fleming, and former NBA head coach (and Chicago native) Mo Cheeks all on their bench.

There’s three legit All-Stars taking the floor every night, and a heap of role players the city of Chicago can be proud of behind them — the Javonte Green’s, Alex Caruso’s, and Lonzo Ball’s.

Let’s not look ahead yet at who the Bulls can’t beat, instead, let’s enjoy all the teams they are beating.

After all, if your question is ‘Who is guarding Durant or Giannis in the playoffs?’, my rebuttal would be: does any team have someone who can truly guard one of those two?

and…

Listen to the question you just asked, and be grateful you asked it. After five losing seasons, and little hope from the entire sports media this offseason, you are thinking about who on the Bulls will guard the world’s greatest in the playoffs.