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Ranking the Chicago Bulls' three best players this coming season
The Chicago Bulls' offseason saw the team end up with a roster very similar to the squad that won just 40 games last season. While pundits and supporters clamored for bigger changes, the team elected to make nominal ones by acquiring role players like Jevon Carter and Torrey Craig. The Bulls' hierarchy, though, remains unchanged as the team will go as far as their three best players—Nikola Vucevic, Zach LaVine, and DeMar DeRozan—take them.
Three more years of Nikola Vucevic
The Bulls did not take long to lock down the big man from Montenegro, as they inked him to a fresh three-year, $60-million deal. As widely criticized as Vooch is for his shortcomings, an analyst says the 6-foot-10 remains a player the Bulls can consistently depend on. Vucevic is coming off a season where he played in all 82 games and averaged a double-double.
"Plenty has been said about Vucevic's limitation as a defender, but not enough attention has been paid to how good the other layers of his game are. He can score from the paint to the perimeter, cleans the glass until it's spotless and is a really clever passer for a 6'10", 260-pound center," Zach Buckley wrote.
Perimeter attack
The Bulls' bread and butter remains its perimeter attack led by its All-Star duo of DeRozan and LaVine. While both players have posted impressive numbers over the last two seasons, it has not translated into plenty of wins, especially last season when the "Big 3" played the most number of minutes in the NBA. And so, it is up to Deebo and Flight 8 to shatter that narrative and take the team on a winning path.
"LaVine is an elite offensive talent who routinely posts silly stats with his scoring, passing and outside shooting. His teams have never won much—he has booked one playoff trip in nine NBA seasons—but it's never been entirely certain how much of that is on him as opposed to the supporting casts around him," Buckley said of LaVine.
