The 2026-27 Chicago Bulls are a rebuilding team, but it wasn’t supposed to be this bad. Eight games into their regular season, this edition of the Bulls sits at a paltry 1-7 win-loss record. Some Bulls fans might argue that the win-loss record doesn’t matter this season because there is an ascending talent on the roster in rookie forward Caleb Wilson.
Wilson aside, this season is a hyper-critical proving ground for forward Matas Buzelis, who looks like he might be on the ropes in a fight to establish himself as a bona fide NBA star-level player. Guard Josh Giddey was supposed to make things easier for this entire roster in his mind as a “pass-first” point guard, but that premise has rarely translated into reality in the Bulls' nascent journey into their 61st NBA regular season.
The state of Bryson Graham’s Chicago Bulls isn’t just bad. It is trending towards Bulls franchise history bad.
For a bit of historical context, the worst Bulls team in a full 82-game NBA season belongs to the 2000-01 Chicago Bulls. A team steeped in infamy as the era of Bulls basketball that dealt with the immediate aftermath of a controversial breakup of the dynastic Chicago Bulls, headlined by Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and head coach Phil Jackson for six NBA championships.
Jackson’s successor, Tim Floyd, earned the dubious distinction of leading a Bulls roster with their own young core of 1999-00 NBA Rookie of the Year Elton Brand, guard Ron Mercer, forward Metta World Peace (fka Ron Artest), and a rookie Jamal Crawford to a disastrous 15-67 win-loss record.
Floyd’s Bulls roster that season was a cellar dweller in terms of offensive rating (29th ranked) and defensive rating (27th ranked). There was no discernible positive attribute to assign to Floyd’s Bulls roster during the 2000-01 regular season.
As for today’s Chicago Bulls head coach, Tiago Splitter, he’s on pace to finish the 2026-27 NBA season with a 10-72 win-loss record, with perhaps a few nominal positives in his roster’s team performance.
Diagnosing the disaster that is Bulls basketball
Like his 2000-01 Bulls counterparts, Splitter’s Bulls through eight games of the regular season are equally bad on the offensive rating (28th ranked) and defensive rating (29th ranked) fronts, according to Basketball Reference.
However, Splitter’s 2026-27 Bulls are also the number one team in the NBA in terms of pace, a top-10-ranked team in both free-throw attempt and three-point attempt rates, while also demonstrating a commitment to cleaning the offensive glass as the 12th-ranked team in terms of offensive rebounding rate, according to Basketball Reference.
Of course, team statistics in isolation don’t mean much when team wins don’t connect to those numbers. Maybe the Bulls can redeem themselves at some point during this season, because if not, Bulls fans may be in for a historic Bulls season for all the wrong reasons.
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