There are a lot of horrific statistics that can help explain how painful this Chicago Bulls season has been, but one involving Luke Kornet and Cristiano Felicio is especially horrifying.
The center position is an endangered species in the NBA. The Houston Rockets have almost completely gotten rid of the position and are playing five small guys together all the time. (I feel compelled to mention that every player Houston puts on the floor is still a large human, just not in relativity to many other NBA players.)
That isn’t to say that centers are irrelevant. The Rockets have been winning games, but I don’t see that holding up in the playoffs. Their lack of size will catch up to them. There are too many insanely good centers they’ll have to go through (see Nikola Jokic, Rudy Gobert, kind of Anthony Davis, kind of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid).
The Chicago Bulls have a really talented, young center of their own in Wendell Carter Jr., but unfortunately, his inability to stay healthy has resulted in him only playing 37 games so far this season. Thanks to on-and-off health injuries involving Lauri Markkanen and Daniel Gafford, Chicago has been forced to play a lot of Luke Kornet and Cristiano Felicio at the five spot lately. That’s… not a good thing.
Both Kornet and Felicio seem like fine guys. I’m sure they’re kind, lovely people off the court. On the court, though, they’re a disaster. Kornet is far better than Felicio, but he’s still not a guy you want to rely on.
RAPTOR
Disclaimer: All statistics mentioned involving RAPTOR are only involving players who have played a minimum of 300 minutes this season.
FiveThirtyEight has a new metric they introduced this season called “RAPTOR.” If you want to read a detailed explanation of RAPTOR, you can go here. But to put it in incredibly simple terms, it’s a statistic that evaluates the impact a player has on his team while he’s on the floor, both offensively and defensively. The higher the RAPTOR, the better.
Like every NBA metric, RAPTOR has its flaws. But for the most part, it’s a fairly accurate representation of how good players are on offense and defense. For example, Rudy Gobert leads the league in defensive RAPTOR at an astounding +7.2. According to the eye test, he’s arguably the best defensive player in the league and his defensive RAPTOR backs that up.
James Harden‘s offensive RAPTOR is another example of how accurate this metric is. He’s leading the league in offensive RAPTOR at a mesmerizing +9.0. Harden leading the league in offensive RAPTOR is as expected as contestants drunkenly crying their eyes out on The Bachelor.
So ultimately, RAPTOR is a good thing. Unless you’re a Bulls fan.
The two guys the Bulls have been forced to rely on at the center position while they’re desperately clinging to their final hopes of making the playoffs are amongst the bottom of the league in total RAPTOR.
Luke Kornet, a guy who has started 14 games at the center position for the Bulls, is 353rd out of 361 qualified players in total RAPTOR. Even worse than that, Cristiano Felicio, a guy who has averaged 22 minutes per game so far in February, is 357th out of 361 players in total RAPTOR.
If you narrow those 361 players down to only centers, Kornet and Felicio are dead last in the league in total RAPTOR. That’s disgustingly bad.
Obviously, the Bulls don’t want to be giving Kornet and Felicio as many minutes as they’ve been giving them recently. Daniel Gafford is finally healthy so he’ll continue to steal minutes, and Wendell Carter Jr. is hopefully returning soon. But when looking at the Bulls’ record over the last few weeks, it’s important to realize that they’ve been rotating between the two worst centers in the league according to a fairly accurate RAPTOR metric.
Even though the center position is arguably less valuable in today’s NBA than it was in the past, it’s still a position that’s holding the Bulls back.