Grading the Chicago Bulls through 70 games
By Luke Askew
Through 70 games, the Chicago Bulls are 24-46. They went 4-6 since my last team grades so without further ado, here are my new team grades for the Bulls.
Overall team grade: D-
Even though the Bulls went nearly .500 in their last 10 games, they get a lower team grade for this ten game stretch than the last one. Their four wins came against the Mavericks, Hawks, and Grizzlies (twice) who are all blatantly tanking and four of the worst teams in the NBA. These barely qualify as wins since both front offices were undoubtedly trying to lose those four games.
The Bulls haven’t beaten a good team in over a month when they shocked the Timberwolves in Jimmy Butler’s return game. Remember Zach LaVine’s stellar performance? LaVine went off for 35 points and carried the Bulls to a victory with some clutch shots in crunch time.
We haven’t seen anything close to that caliber of play since then from LaVine who is going through a bit of a slump while the rest of the team struggles as well.
Since that win against the Timberwolves, they’ve only won five games. They beat the aforementioned three teams (Grizzlies twice). The other victory? Well, it came against the Magic so take that for what it’s worth (not much).
The Bulls are a bad team, but they seem just a tiny tier above the league’s worst which is good, I think? At least they aren’t at the bottom of the league… right?
Tanking grade: B-
It’s getting a little tricky to grade the Bulls’ tanking performance. Like I said, they haven’t beaten a good team in over a month – so that’s a really good thing. When tanking, you can’t be stealing wins against better teams.
But they also keep beating teams worse than them solidifying them in the middle-lottery instead of anywhere near the top.
They had a terrible tanking win against the Grizzlies but then a couple games later followed it up with an excellent tanking win against the Knicks.
So at this point, I don’t know anymore.
The tanking grade really depends on what your individual expectations were for the Bulls at the start of the season. For me, when they started 3-20, I was mentally prepared for someone like Luka Doncic or Marvin Bagley III to be a Bull next year. Now, it’s looking like it’ll be someone closer to Miles Bridges or Mikal Bridges (neither of which are bad options by any means).
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So yeah, I’m a little disappointed in some of their wins against terrible teams, but on a deeper level, it is nice to know that the Bulls can beat those teams. If they couldn’t, we might have bigger problems on our hands.