The Chicago Bulls are a surprising 5-0 to start the season, the lone undefeated team remaining in the Eastern Conference. Yet they also are starting one of the worst players in the league this year in Isaac Okoro; something has to give.
The hot start from the Bulls is likely something not even the most ardent Chicago sports fan saw coming. They have hardly played a cupcake schedule; they have notched wins over the Detroit Pistons, the Atlanta Hawks, the Orlando Magic and the New York Knicks, all projected playoff teams coming into the season.
Josh Giddey has picked up right where he left off last season and is on an All-Star pace as he fills up the stat sheet and also shoots like prime Stephen Curry. Matas Buzelis has made the leap as a sophomore. Nikola Vucevic has drunk from the fountain of youth and can't miss a jumper. Kevin Huerter has revived his career. Tre Jones has stepped up. Patrick Williams doesn't look entirely dead.
Isaac Okoro has been terrible to start the season
In the midst of their success, however, there is one player who is having a truly awful start to the season: Isaac Okoro. The Bulls traded Lonzo Ball to the Cleveland Cavaliers for the defensively-minded Okoro, expecting to get one of the league's better point-of-attack defenders to slot into the lineup next to Giddey. The pairing made a lot of sense on paper; Giddey cannot stay in front of faster, smaller guards, so a guard-sized player who can defend opposing guards but doesn't handle the ball seems like the natural fit.
The problem is that the Cavaliers moved on from Okoro because he's not good enough on offense to justify significant playing time, and what has happened to begin the season is that Okoro has been so bad on offense he isn't deserving any playing time.
Through five games, Isaac Okoro is playing 22.6 minutes per game but averaging only 4.4 points, in large part because he is shooting a shockingly-bad 32.1 percent from the field and 23.1 percent from 3-point range. He has six turnovers to just seven assists, has only snagged two steals, and has a grand total of one free-throw attempts for the season.
It's not that he has been an otherworldly defender, either. Both Ayo Dosunmu and Tre Jones are clearly outplaying him on that end of the court as well. Add it all up, and you get a player who is below-average defensively thus far and one of the worst players in the league on offense; that's a disaster and he's filling up space in the starting lineup.
To use an objective metric, Box Plus-Minus takes a player's box score contributions across the board and evaluates a player's impact. Okoro ranks 191st out of 194 eligible players in that statistic. When you take the entire league into account and weight by playing time, Okoro ranks 420th out of 428 players who have seen playing time.
Billy Donovan has already begun to adjust. While Okoro did get the start in Chicago's NBA Cup Game vs the New York Knicks on Friday night, he had an extremely short leash, playing only 16 minutes in total and just three in the fourth quarter.
If Okoro continues to play like this, he will be replaced in the starting lineup and in the rotation. Part of the problem is that the team doesn't have a direct replacement for him; Jones cannot adequately slide up to defend wings, and Dosunmu is a different sort of player and has his own offensive issues. There is no true "3-and-D" wing ready to step up.
If the Bulls keep playing this well, there will be opportunities to address the need on the trade market. Coby White will return soon to bolster the backcourt rotation. The trade for Ball will continue to look worse, and Okoro's contract is still on the books for this year and next, but that is a sunk cost.
The Bulls hope that Okoro bounces back and can be a contributing piece of their rotation moving forward. Thus far, however, one of the best teams in the league has been starting one of the worst players in the league.