A surplus of Bulls guards following the team’s blockbuster trade of former All-Star wing Zach LaVine has yielded an interesting issue for head coach Billy Donovan. As Julia Poe of The Chicago Tribune notes, Donovan is looking to thread the needle between putting giving his best players enough minutes and developing the club’s younger backcourt contributors.
“We have an overabundance of guards, quite honestly,” Donovan said. “We just do. I think we have nine guards. It’s a lot.”
Poe observes that the Bulls traded LaVine and cut guard Chris Duarte, while bringing in Kevin Huerter and Tre Jones — ostensibly, then, the team offloaded two guards and brought in two guards. But LaVine, at 6’5″, was the team’s starting small forward, and thanks to his athleticism could play a bit bigger than his size. He was also a considerably more multifaceted and prolific scorer than either of the two new additions.
“With the number of guards we have, I’m not opposed to the times when we’ve started with four guards,” Donovan said. “But that may not be the best thing for this group rotation-wise.”
The Bulls’ unbalanced roster appears ready-made to fall further into the depths of lottery contenders. So far, Chicago has gone 1-4 in its five games since the LaVine deal, including losing the last four straight.
There’s more out of the Windy City:
- The Bulls suffered their worst loss of the season, a 132-92 defeat to the Pistons on Tuesday, and followed that up with a 128-110 encore loss to Detroit on Wednesday. Poe writes in another piece that Chicago fans booed their own team early into the Tuesday bout’s second quarter. “It’s embarrassing,” Donovan said. “There’s no question about it.” Without LaVine’s scoring acumen, Poe notes that the Bulls could be in for a lot more losing in the last 27 games of the year.
- After moving LaVine, the Bulls received offers about another former two-time All-Star on their roster, center Nikola Vucevic. Chicago ultimately opted not to move on from the 34-year-old veteran’s contract even while clearly pivoting to a rebuild. Poe wonders in an additional story if whiffed on what could have been a prime opportunity to extract the most value possible for the 6’10” vet. Poe observes that Chicago brass expects to be able to fetch more assets in a potential deal this offseason.
- The Bulls hope to take stock of their revised roster during the All-Star break, writes Kyle Williams of The Chicago Sun-Times (subscriber link). “We’ll come back and meet as a group within plenty of time before we see the team to talk about some of those things,” Donovan said. “There may be some things that we put in offensively and defensively that we feel that maybe could help some of the things maybe we struggled with.”