The Chicago Bulls are going for a complete rebuild, but two of their current players stand in the way.
You could argue that Zach LaVine fits into the new youth movement, but Nikola Vucević is a clear outlier. Chicago has been trying to trade Vucević for weeks, but to no avail. No one wants to take on Vucević’s bad defense, an unfortunate aspect of his game that has plummeted his value.
Vucević is a hard sell on the trade market because he is overpaid. He’s also overrated, according to Bleacher Report’s Grant Hughes, who in a new article Tuesday ranked Vucević as the No. 4 most overrated NBA player of the last five years.
“The Chicago Bulls certainly overrated Nikola Vučević when they sent out Wendell Carter Jr., Otto Porter Jr. and a pair of future first-round picks to land him in 2021,” Hughes said.
“Vučević has mostly been an empty-calorie stat-stuffer … he's essentially a high-usage offensive piece who can't score efficiently because he never draws fouls, doesn't shoot enough threes and converts his low rate of rim attempts at a middling clip. 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 Vučević was on the floor. 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…”
Will Chicago be able to find a new home for Vucević before the 2024-25 season starts?
More likely, Vucević will stay put, putting head coach Billy Donovan in an interesting position as he balances the Bulls being bad with the Bulls being terrible.
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