Overrated players in Chicago Bulls’ history: Eddy Curry
It’s not often that you find a big man in recent history for the Bulls that had so much weight on his shoulders while not filling up the stat sheet effectively at all in most seasons he played for the team. But this is the case with the former fourth overall pick of Krause and the Bulls in the first round of the 2001 NBA Draft, and seven-foot big man Eddy Curry.
This towering 7-foot and 295-pound power forward/center didn’t do much to help the Bulls ignite a struggling rebuild in the early-2000s. In fact, you could argue that he was the least effective lottery pick among big men for this team from 1995-2003 (around the end of the Krause era in Chicago).
Curry did get better in the latter years of his NBA career, mostly playing for the Eastern Conference foe New York Knicks.
But his four seasons with the Bulls at the outset of his NBA career didn’t se him give the team much of any efficiency on either end of the floor. He never registered a total rebounding percentage north of 14 in any of his four seasons with the Bulls, and his box plus/minus with the team sat just south of -2.5. His value over replacement player rating also didn’t come close to finishing above zero.
And although his number of win shares per 48 concentrated by usage wasn’t all that bad compared to the rest of this group, around 27, other metrics show how ineffective he was at times. For instance, in each of the four seasons that Curry played with the Bulls, his turnover rate was more than half of his usage rate. And he never had an assist rate that even came close to matching a number at half of his turnover rate.