Basketball analytics pioneer and current data scientist at ESPN, Dean Oliver, published an analysis of select Chicago Bulls players, presumably from the 2025-26 NBA regular season, on social media.
Oliver's analysis is intended to visualize how those players performed, as measured by Oliver’s Net Points per 100 Possessions advanced player impact metric, against different quality tiers of NBA competition.
The Bulls' players and how they did against different levels of competition last year
— Dean Oliver (@DeanO_Lytics) July 7, 2026
- Jones pretty steady and solid. A few guys steady and bad
- Giddey struggled vs Really Good teams
- Smith's +5.6 vs Really Good is a smaller sample pic.twitter.com/lPbbVZQ7HL
The striking takeaway from Oliver’s analysis of the Bulls is that an alarming number of the sampled roster is bad, no matter what grade of competition is on the floor.
To Bulls lead front office executive, Bryson Graham’s credit, he has already enacted prudent roster actions in the 2026 NBA offseason that address the bad news within Oliver’s impact analysis of the Bulls' roster. Gone are center Guerson Yabusele and guard Anfernee Simons, who didn’t grade well against good or really good competition, according to Oliver.
Free agent forward Guerschon Yabusele has agreed to a three-year deal with Panathinaikos, league sources told @hoopshype. Yabusele will be one of the top three highest-paid European players. He's averaged 8.3 points over the past two NBA seasons with the 76ers, Bulls and Knicks. pic.twitter.com/UjfAxXy5S0
— Michael Scotto (@MikeAScotto) July 8, 2026
Collin Sexton departed for the Los Angeles Lakers and a new two-year $19 million contract.
Perhaps there's a case to be made that the Bulls would have made good use of their room exception if they could have retained Sexton for that price tag and given that he shot the highest three-point volume of his entire NBA career, 5.2 three-point attempts per game at a 41.0% clip, during his 26-game stay with the Bulls after the 2026 NBA trade deadline.
Free agent Collin Sexton has agreed to a two-year, $19 million deal with the Los Angeles Lakers, sources tell ESPN. pic.twitter.com/S2MBPxTSH4
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) July 1, 2026
The remaining active Bulls in Oliver’s analysis should trigger provocative thoughts for both Graham’s front office and Bulls fans to weigh about the current state of the Chicago Bulls’ roster.
Red Flags for Matas Buzelis?
Expectations were high for Bulls forward Matas Buzelis at the start of his 2025-26 NBA season, and it’s fair to say Buzelis’ season didn’t quite live up to the growing expectations that his size and highlight reel created for him over his first two NBA seasons.
Dean Oliver’s numbers are a somber signal that Buzelis has a tremendous amount of work ahead of him going into his third NBA season to realize a performance leap to justify receiving a Bulls extension and avoiding a restricted free agency standoff in the summer of 2028.
Cut bait on Isaac Okoro and Rob Dillingham
Dean Oliver’s basketball mathematics put a pretty bow on an obvious picture that the eyes of most Bulls fans already witnessed by watching Bulls games during the 2025-26 NBA season: Isaac Okoro and Rob Dillingham are not effective NBA players against any grade of NBA competition.
Ideally, the Bulls should move Okoro to a new NBA team for literally anything to repurpose his salary and roster spot for more shooting to improve spacing around the Bulls’ rookies and Josh Giddey. As for Dillingham, the solution for Dillingham’s woeful results in Chicago is simple: the Bulls should decline his team option and let him walk in 2027 NBA free agency.
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