The 2026-27 NBA season will be a watershed period for Bulls forward Matas Buzelis.
Ever confident, Buzelis is set to embark on his third NBA season, which will be a critical evaluation point that influences whether Buzelis earns a contract extension from the Bulls during the 2027 NBA offseason or if he becomes another young NBA player fed to the salary meat grinder that is NBA restricted free agency.
Buzelis, absent a contract extension, is due to hit restricted free agency during the 2028 NBA offseason. Bulls fans have pinned much of their passionate hope on Buzelis becoming the superstar the franchise has desperately lacked since Jimmy Butler.
The Buzelis superstar leap Bulls fans covet isn’t just a change in vibes. Buzelis realizing a third-year NBA career leap will require real empirical evidence.
Buzelis’ opportunity space for NBA growth
Matas Buzelis, through two seasons of his NBA basketball career, has seared a brand of basketball in the minds of Bulls fans that instantly connects him to dunks and blocks. If Buzelis has it his way, his next branding campaign with Bulls fans will be to get them to fall in love with his midrange jump shot.
However, a real superstar leap opportunity for Matas Buzelis would be selection to the 2026-27 NBA All-Defensive Team. NBA defense isn’t simply a matter of collecting steals and blocks. NBA defensive impact in 2026 skews toward qualitative attributes instead of quantitative attributes more than ever.
A Buzelis selection to an NBA All-Defensive Team would certify the NBA G League Ignite product as a top-10 all-around NBA defender.
The award would mean a third-year Buzelis transcended his foundational weak-side shot-blocking abilities into, hopefully, a Bulls defensive anchor who can reliably take perimeter defensive assignments and attack passing lanes, and keep his four other Bulls teammates on a tight rotational string to get stops.
On the offensive side, Buzelis would be better served putting his midrange dreams on the back burner and making a concerted effort to drastically improve in any one of the following basketball categories that aren’t blockbuster stats in Buzelis’ box score: three-point percentage, drawing free-throw attempts, or rebounding.
In Buzelis’ entire NBA career, his three-point percentage is 35.9%, while averaging 2.2 free-throw attempts per game and 4.6 rebounds per game, according to Basketball Reference.
Picking the right NBA career benchmarks for Buzelis
Buzelis acknowledged a working relationship he’s formed with Houston Rockets forward Kevin Durant. Objectively, there is a treasure trove of basketball wisdom that Matas Buzelis can absorb from the conversations he has with Durant.
Yet, Durant entered the NBA as a near-complete scorer in his rookie season and rounded out to a 30-point-per-game-tier MVP candidate scorer by his third season. Buzelis jumping from his 16.9 points-per-game average in the 2025-26 NBA season to anything close to averaging 30 points per game in the 2026-27 NBA season seems unlikely.
A more relevant NBA player benchmark Buzelis should follow is Celtics forward Paul George, whose third-year NBA leap was balanced between scoring and defense as he earned 2012-13 NBA All-Defensive Team Second Team recognition while averaging 17.4 points per game.
An even better NBA career benchmark for Buzelis is the last homegrown Bulls superstar, Jimmy Butler, who was largely an offensive afterthought in his third NBA season, the 2013-14 NBA season, but earned his first NBA All-Defensive Team selection by establishing himself as a relentless defender who was willing to take the Bulls’ LeBron James defender assignment to great effect.
Matas Buzelis can make the superstar leap Bulls fans want to see if he’s willing to earn it on the defensive side of the ball.
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