Dragan Bender, PF
Less than five years ago, one of the most promising young big men in the NBA was the former Phoenix Suns seven-footer and Bosnian power forward Dragan Bender. Since the Suns officially parted ways with Bender more than 18 months ago, he’s floated around a couple of different teams in the league.
Since the summer of 2019, Bender had signed contracts with the Milwaukee Bucks and Golden State Warriors. The most recent team he played for was the Warriors, but they officially parted ways with him before the turn of the calendar year.
Bender never found a consistent home in the NBA to date, and he didn’t even make it through Training Camp and the preseason with the Warriors leading into the current regular season.
It wasn’t necessarily injury issues that ever held Bender back. He just wasn’t really ever that efficient with any team he played for. But there were slight signs of improvement over the course of the last three years with the Suns, Bucks, and Warriors.
The number of win shares per 48 minutes for Bender improved at least slightly in each of the past three seasons. If the rest of his game can come along with that improvement in the advanced metrics, then Bender could be worth another shot with a team like the Bulls.
It might be a hard sell to get Bulls fans to buy into another big man from that “unicorn” era in the NBA Draft that fourth-year power forward Lauri Markkanen came out of. But they can at least give him a shot at the end of the frontcourt rotation.