Chicago Bulls: 3 worst big men that still got playing time in last 5 years

Cristiano Felicio, PF/C

The most familiar name to a lot of Bulls fans now that should not have received as many minutes in the frontcourt rotation in recent years as he did is the towering 6-foot-10 and 270 pound Brazilian power forward/center Cristiano Felicio. The 28-year-old Felicio is now in his fifth year with the Bulls.

A lot of the damage that the GarPax front office regime did to the Bulls cap sheet and frontcourt rotation over the long haul involved overpaying Felicio back during the 2017 offseason. The Bulls handed Felicio a four-year contract extension in the summer of 2017, worth a whopping $32 million that was mostly frontloaded.

This season is the final year of the current contract of Felicio. That is great news for the Bulls new front office regime of Karnisovas and Eversley since they will have that extra cap room to bolster the frontcourt rotation potentially come next offseason. While this is very hard to believe, Felicio is the third highest-paid big man on the Bulls’ current cap sheet (depending on what you want to define Thaddeus Young and Al-Farouq Aminu as positionally).

In more than 243 career regular season games played with the Bulls, Felicio averaged 4.4 points per game, 4.0 rebounds, 0.7 assists, 0.3 steals, and 0.2 blocks. And he’s shot 57.3 percent from the field, missed on every single one of a dozen attempts from beyond the arc, and 67.6 percent from the free-throw line.

All of that amounted to a less than stellar -2.5 box plus/minus rating, -0.4 value over replacement player rating, but somehow a 14.1 player efficiency rating (largely thanks to a plethora of rebounds).