Barely two months after making a blockbuster trade for Kevin Durant, the Houston Rockets' NBA title hopes took a significant hit with point guard Fred VanVleet expected to miss the 2025-26 season with a torn ACL. While they're far from championship contenders, an injury to Nikola Vucevic would have a similar impact on the Chicago Bulls, given their lack of depth at center.
Executive VP of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas spent this offseason peppering his roster with combo forwards. He selected Noa Essengue with the No. 12 pick in the 2025 draft. He traded a guard for a wing in dealing Lonzo Ball to Cleveland for Isaac Okoro.
Kevin Huerter is still around, entering the final year of his contract, and Karnisovas can't let go of Patrick Williams. The franchise expects a massive leap from Matas Buzelis in his second NBA campaign.
But The Offseason of the Wing in Chicago has come at the expense of upgrading the team's weakest position.
The Bulls are still thin and uninspiring at center
Vucevic proved during EuroCup 2025 that he can still perform at a high level, and last season was his ninth straight averaging a double-double (18.5 points, 10.1 rebounds). He shot a career-high 40.2 percent from three. He played in 73 games, the fifth consecutive year he's hit the 70-contest mark.
He'll also turn 35 years old shortly after the season starts, and at some point, his ironman durability is going to disappear. He'll have played 1,000 career games before the All-Star break rolls around.
If anything were to happen to Vucevic, Zach Collins would be the next man up, and the best word to describe the 27-year-old would be "serviceable." Despite being the 10th overall pick in the 2017 draft, Collins has never been a regular starter; he's played 378 career games and has started 83 of them.
He had a solid stretch filling in for Vucevic after he arrived from San Antonio in the Zach LaVine trade, but his averages of 8.6 points, 6.7 rebounds and 2.1 assists across 28 contests with Chicago won't cut it for a starting NBA center.
After Collins would presumably come Jalen Smith, who fell out of the rotation completely at the end of last season. Smith's most attractive attribute is his ability to stretch the floor as a big man, but he only hit 32.4 percent from deep on 3.5 attempts a night in his first year with the Bulls.
Buzelis could fill in as an emergency center, but is far better suited as a power forward or even small forward. Lachlan Olbrich was a second-round pick this summer who doesn't seem equipped to handle anything other than spot minutes at most.
Needless to say, the Bulls would be in serious trouble if a 35-year-old in his 15th NBA season who's nearing 1,000 career games were to have injury problems. Not an ideal place to be.