The Chicago Bulls are officially all-in on point guard Josh Giddey.
After a laborious 71-day period of negotiations, the Bulls finally came to terms with Giddey this week on a four-year, $100 million deal.
There was never any true concern about Giddey not returning to Chicago. It’s what both sides wanted — a long-term agreement to keep the 22-year-old Aussie as a focal point for a Bulls team looking to build around youth. Yet as the offseason stretched on, Giddey was one of the last restricted free agents left on the market alongside the Golden State Warriors’ Jonathan Kuminga and the Philadelphia 76ers’ Quentin Grimes.
So why the long wait?
The only standoff between the Bulls and Giddey revolved around money. When free agency opened, the parameters for negotiations seemed pretty simple. Giddey’s camp wanted $30 million a year. The Bulls were offering $20 million.
Logic suggested the winner of the negotiations would be determined by whether the final number was above or below $25 million annually. Instead, the Bulls and Giddey split the difference, making it less tidy to label a clear winner.
The Bulls probably could’ve forced Giddey to accept a lower number. At this point in the offseason, the market wasn’t on his side. There’s a chance he would have gutted out the game of chicken by playing the 2025-26 season on the one-year, $11 million qualifying offer and hitting unrestricted free agency market next summer, but that’s a rare gamble to take for a young player with plenty to prove.
Still, the Bulls avoided their Achilles’ heel in the bargaining process: attaching an unnecessary player option to an already questionable deal.
The current roster is littered with player options, none more notorious than the $18 million fifth-year option in forward Patrick Williams’ overblown $90 million contract. By sticking to a four-year deal, the Bulls gave themselves some limited flexibility even while attaching themselves to Giddey for the long term.
On Giddey’s side, this contract is nothing but a win. He has a clear roadmap for the next four years of his career with an organization that clearly is bought in on his value as a centerpiece of the rebuild.
Giddey is now a top-100 player in the league in terms of compensation. It makes sense for the starting point guard of any NBA team to make that kind of money. What isn’t necessarily proven, however, is what he can accomplish in that role.
The offensive gifts Giddey brings are obvious, if limited. He’s a stellar passer who averaged 7.2 assists last season. He showed an improved ability to get downhill, which opened more of the offense after the All-Star break. His 3-point shooting also is improving, a crucial piece of his ability to space the floor for a somewhat awkwardly sized Bulls lineup.
Giddey’s teammates and coaches often point to his height — 6-foot-8, notably taller than most point guards — as an important asset. Yet he rarely takes advantage of his size because of his lack of mobility on defense.
Sure, he’s tall enough to be a decent deterrent with his hands up in the paint. But teams eagerly pummel Giddey with switches and screens and any other type of action that might exploit his shortcomings in one-on-one situations.
Giddey, to his credit, is not in denial. He readily accepted criticism last season, including an early game in Cleveland during which he was benched for the majority of the second half after completely dissolving on defense. Giddey did improve in both effort and intent as the season progressed, which earned praise throughout the organization.
The problem is the Bulls aren’t a strong defensive team even without taking Giddey into account. They traded away their two best defensive guards — Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso — over the last two offseasons. Second-year forward Matas Buzelis has shown flashes of promise, but guard Ayo Dosunmu is the best remaining defender in the team’s young core and he often comes off the bench.
Giddey’s defensive inadequacy is paired with a tendency to melt in the postseason. He arrived in Chicago in the trade for Caruso after a disastrous 2024 playoff outing with the Oklahoma City Thunder that resulted in a benching. And things didn’t get better in Giddey’s lone postseason appearance with the Bulls, an embarrassing blowout at home at the hands of the Miami Heat in the play-in tournament.
So with that context in mind, did the Bulls lose yet another round of negotiations in restricted free agency?
Giddey’s contract isn’t an outright loss. The Bulls got the deal done without egregiously overpaying, and Giddey is young enough to make sizable improvements in key areas that could elevate him into a more well-rounded player.
But a long-term commitment to a player with Giddey’s weaknesses means the Bulls need to be cagier about their approach to player acquisition and retention in the future. If they keep betting on players without defensive aptitude, they will quickly become a team that’s easy to run over — and easy to count out of the playoffs.