Full offseason report card and overall grade
The Chicago Bulls brought back most of their key free agents, added a guard and drafted a forward. How do things look all together?
1. Signed Torrey Craig
Grade: A-
2. Re-signed Coby White
Grade: B+
3. Signed Jevon Carter
Grade: B
4. Re-signed Ayo Dosunmo
Grade: B-
5. Drafted Julian Phillips
Grade: C
6. Re-signed Nikola Vucevic
Grade: C-
Overall Grade
The Chicago Bulls have spent the past few seasons refusing to look in the mirror; or conversely, perhaps they’re simply looking in a funhouse mirror at a distorted and unrealistic view of themselves. The Bulls are not a contender and cannot be a contender with this core of players.
If their goal was to maintain a team on the fringes of the Play-In Tournament each season, they accomplished that task. Bringing back Vucevic, White and Dosunmo will help them maintain last year’s rotation, and Carter is the exact kind of high-floor, low-ceiling role player to maintain a status quo.
The problem is that the Bulls clearly think that if they can get healthy they can make a move in the Eastern Conference, perhaps fueled by their hot start in 2021-22. That version of the Bulls was a mirage anyway, but it’s also not coming back. The Bulls needed to find a path forward that wasn’t simply “win 40 games” and they couldn’t do that.
Most of these deals look fine in a vacuum, but taken together they reveal a mistaken approach to team-building. And by signing three-year deals, Chicago is planning to live in purgatory for the foreseeable future. That’s a bitter pill of mediocrity for fans to swallow.
Grade: C