The Chicago Bulls cannot afford to lose their top-10 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, but their current roster places them in terrible danger of doing exactly that.
Everyone knows that Chicago is rebuilding, but a huge pillar of that rebuild -- perhaps the most important -- is a player that the Bulls will draft next June.
The 2025 draft class is loaded with talent, headlined by a potentially generational wing in Cooper Flagg, who raised a ton of eyebrows on Monday by holding his own against Team USA competition, a.k.a. a bunch of Hall of Famers still playing in the NBA.
Getting a player like Flagg in the draft would mean everything to the Bulls. It would give the franchise a chance to rise out of the swamp of mediocrity it has been stuck in since Michael Jordan (excluding a two-year Derrick Rose moment).
Suppose that's a severe and unfair overestimation of Flagg's potential. It probably is. After all, he still has an entire college season to play before being ultimately evaluated by 2025 lottery teams.
But if it's not Flagg, it will be someone else in the 2025 draft. Ace Bailey, Dylan Harper, VJ Edgecombe and others form a ridiculous class that is sure to produce at least one or two future superstars.
If Flagg doesn't end up being the greatest prize of the '25 draft, he's certainly the current poster boy for its wealth of talent and consequential importance to teams like Chicago.
Bulls fans have already given up hopes of being competitive in 2024-25, but that disappointment has been replaced by excitement about not only Josh Giddey, Jalen Smith, Matas Buzelis, and the rest of Chicago's new youth, but about the Bulls' draft pick next season.
The huge problem facing the Bulls is that they may be unable to trade Zach LaVine and Nikola Vučević this summer, which not only hurts them financially but makes their rotation far less tank-able than it needs to be.
While a Vučević-Lonzo Ball exchange for Ben Simmons would do much to cure this ailment, Chicago's executive Artūras Karnišovas would never consider such an original proposition.
Karnišovas is on the path to a great rebuild, but he's only halfway through the woods and nightfall has descended (translation: no one's calling about LaVine).
If Chicago's current roster fires on all cylinders next season, there's no reason why these Bulls can't sneak in as an eight-seed in the East, which would be disastrous.
Such an outcome would only lead to more and more mediocrity moving forward, which the Bulls have had far too much of in the last thirty years.
Karnišovas needs to do something radical to get rid of LaVine and/or Vučević, and soon.
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