Post last year's All-Star break, the Chicago Bulls got dramatically better in a way that no NBA team has in 20 years. That transformation helped head coach Billy Donovan's group win 17 of its final 27 games and become one of the league's winningest teams down the stretch.
A chunk of that can be attributed to individual player development. Josh Giddey averaged 21.2 points, 10.7 rebounds and 9.3 assists in his 19 games after the break. Coby White was a top-10 scorer in the league in the season's final 10 games. Matas Buzelis solidified a spot in Donovan's starting rotation and averaged 13.0 points and 4.8 rebounds with shooting splits of 47/36/83.
Kevin Huerter joined Buzelis as a regular starter and became an under-the-radar piece that helped glue those lineups together. After posting career-worst numbers with the Sacramento Kings, the 26-year-old found his groove in Chicago, scoring 14.4 points per game while hitting 39.7 percent of his 7.6 three-point attempts a night after the break.
Add that together and you get one of the best offenses in the NBA. But it's no surprise those players started to click later in the year -- the system was designed for it.
The Chicago Bulls made a historic leap after the 2024-25 All-Star break
Prior to the Feb. 12 layoff, the Bulls ranked 23rd in point differential at -4.8. After the break, that number jumped to +4.8. That was the biggest improvement (9.6 points per 100 possessions) any NBA team has made in 20 years, per John Schumann of NBA.com.
That leap almost exclusively came on the back of Chicago's offense.
The Bulls finished the 2024-25 season sixth in points per game, but they were second after the break, averaging 121.5 points. That number trailed only the eventual NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder.
The ball moved more quickly -- and crisply -- in Chicago's offense as well. Led by the playmaking exploits of Giddey, the Bulls were fifth in assists per game over that span, sixth in assist percentage and fifth in assist-to-turnover ratio.
They also cut their turnovers down nearly two per game, which may not seem like a ton, but considering Chicago simultaneously played at the league's fastest pace, that equated to not only more possessions but fewer empty ones.
Indeed, as Schumann also notes, the Bulls made the second biggest jumps in the NBA last year in both ball and player movement and were the only team to rank in the top three in both categories. Unsurprisingly, that led to the league's most significant bump in overall shot quality.
The totality of those improvements on offense that also, critically, led to an increase in winning are positive developments for Chicago that can realistically carry over to 2025-26.