After much anticipation, the Chicago Bulls finally started their 2026-27 NBA regular season campaign on the road against the Toronto Raptors. Sadly, any Bulls fan who tuned in with the optimistic hope of seeing good things about their favorite NBA franchise, well, ball that crap up and throw it in the trash.
The Bulls never took a game lead against the Raptors. To be fair, the Bulls collectively looked bad in their 2026-27 regular-season debut. However, there is a concerning crossroads that must be addressed as it relates to Bulls guard Josh Giddey.
Giddey, now entering his third season in a Bulls uniform, has been nothing short of a polarizing player within the Bulls fanbase since his arrival in Chicago during the 2024 NBA offseason. Bulls fan debates over Giddey’s presence inside the Bulls organization have persisted on a spectrum between “look at Giddey’s box score” and “Josh Giddey doesn’t play winning basketball”.
The beauty of the corporal punishment the Toronto Raptors dispensed to the Bulls in their 2026-27 NBA regular season debut is that the Raptors’ defense and physicality in the game served effectively as a basketball polygraph for everything Bulls fans witnessed in the Bulls’ 2026-27 NBA preseason games, especially as it relates to Giddey.
It is time for Bulls fans to end debates about Giddey after regular-season game one against the Raptors because the film is painfully clear about who Josh Giddey is as an NBA player today and likely tomorrow.
Giddey’s offseason optimism died in the first quarter
Josh Giddey’s fundamental problem, if he aspires to be a starting NBA point guard, is that he does not create a consistent offensive advantage with the ball in his hands. It’s not for lack of trying, either.
Giddey established a respectable two-man game with Jalen Smith in the first quarter to earn two assists. Not quite a pure copy-and-paste of Bulls head coach Tiago Splitter’s Portland Trail Blazers work in weaponizing forward Deni Avdija into an on-ball battering ram to the rim, those two sequences were good because you had Giddey driving the ball downhill to collapse the Raptors’ defense to create a rim run for Smith.
Despite the Giddey-Smith two-man game chemistry of the first quarter, Giddey was largely a non-factor in the Bulls' offense. At no point did the Bulls ever challenge the Raptors for a game lead. Giddey displayed all-too-familiar ball-handling issues, logging sloppy turnovers, and he never found a shooting rhythm or credible shooting volume to command respect from the opposing defense.
Giddey must create advantages, or he must be traded
It’s early in the season, but Josh Giddey’s future with the Chicago Bulls must be predicated on creating a sustainable offensive advantage. Ideally, that could be accomplished through some off-ball creativity in the sort of actions Giddey runs when he gives up the ball. Certainly another avenue Giddey could explore is simply getting up more catch-and-shoot threes, even at the expense of passing the ball.
Based on how Giddey fared against the Raptors' mauling defense, Giddey finding an early shooting rhythm is more valuable than him finding another assist-counting stat.
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