There are two ways to look at this season for the Chicago Bulls. The first is to see a team that is trending up, winning eight of its last 12 games and beating a number of Eastern Conference contenders throughout the season. This is a team with the firepower to hang with any team in the East and could talk itself into a playoff push.
The other is to take a step back and look at the big picture. The Bulls are 19-22 for the season, in 10th place in the Eastern Conference, and with the 11th-worst net rating in the league. While they have been without Lonzo Ball for the entire season, he isn’t likely to return anytime soon, and their core has otherwise been incredibly healthy: Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan, Nikola Vucevic, and Patrick Williams have missed a combined four games all season. That is unlikely to last.
The Chicago Bulls should expect to go down, not up, the rest of the season.
There are a number of paths available to the Bulls from here. They could keep everything together, give this season their best shot, and ask hard questions this summer. They could elect to retool and stay competitive, perhaps trading LaVine and his balky knees or trading Vucevic and/or DeRozan to reset the timeline around LaVine.
The most drastic move would be to blow it all up, trading all three and making their best run at holding onto the top-4 protected pick they owe the Orlando Magic. That’s a difficult and unlikely choice to make, but it’s at least something they have to consider. If (and it’s a big if) they were to blow it up, a popular trade site has a proposal for how they could go about that.