USC Basketball: Former Trojans Center Ranked Among NBA's Most Overrated Players

This is not an inaccurate appraisal.

Jan 27, 2024; Los Angeles, California, USA; The Southern California Trojans logo at center court at the Galen Center. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports / Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Former two-time All-Pac-10 USC Trojans center Nikola Vucevic, now with the Chicago Bulls, has been ranked by Grant Hughes of Bleacher Report as the fourth-most overrated player in the league, across its last five seasons.

L.A. Clippers point guard James Harden is somehow ranked first, ahead of Brooklyn Nets point guard Ben Simmons. Granted, Harden has jettisoned himself from three franchises, while Simmons has only forced his way off of one. But at least Harden plays, and is still a fringe All-Star thanks to his adept passing and scoring. Simmons has been available for just 67 of 246 possible regular season games across his last three years of NBA action, and can't shoot to save his life.

A two-time All-Star while with the Orlando Magic, Vucevic was acquired by the Chicago Bulls in exchange for former lottery pick center Wendell Carter Jr., small forward Otto Porter Jr., and two eventual lottery picks. Those picks turned into small forward Franz Wagner and shooting guard Jett Howard. Bulls team president Arturas Karnisovas no doubt had hoped that Vucevic would serve as a win-now double-double-machine for the team. While the 6-foot-10 big man did indeed pull down an abundance of rebounds and served as an above-average passer for his position, his occasional ball stopping and lackluster defense were surely not enough to warrant surrendering so many assets.

"Under the hood, though, Vucevic has mostly been an empty-calorie stat-stuffer, particularly with the Bulls, who never figured out how to replicate the smoke-and-mirrors scheme Orlando used to coax solid defense out of lineups featuring the ground-bound center," Hughes writes. "The 33-year-old's steady diet of mid-range jumpers is offensive poison, and he's been a catastrophically negative force on defense in three of the last five years."

"In hindsight, the Bulls should have seen that last part coming. In his final season with the Magic, their defensive rating plummeted by 8.2 points per 100 possessions when Vucevic was on the floor," Hughes adds, before adding insult to injury for Chicago fans. "At least the Bulls didn't throw good money after bad by handing him a three-year, $60 million extension in the summer of 2023. Oh, wait..."

Formerly a solid 3-point marksman, the 33-year-old has massively regressed from beyond the arc across the last three seasons. Vucevic has connected on a below-average 32 percent of his 4.3 triple tries a night.

Last season, Vucevic proved fairly durable, appearing in 76 games for a lackluster 39-43 Chicago club. He averaged 18.0 points on a .484/.294/.822 slash line, 10.5 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 0.8 blocks and 0.7 steals. In a vacuum , those are solid stats. But he was also an active detriment to the team on both sides of the ball, clogging up the offense by demanding more possessions than he deserved, and failing to stop anybody inside the paint. He's too unathletic to be switched out onto the perimeter, making him a bonus defensive liability.

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