Zach Lowe destroys Bulls in podcast rant and he's right

The Chicago Bulls have not had a good offseason and everyone is letting them know about it. 

The Bulls are finally tanking (I think) and doing it at a good time, as they need to keep their top-10 protected pick in a loaded 2025 draft class. 

But their route to get there was littered with mistakes in the form of mismanaged assets from Alex Caruso to DeMar DeRozan to Andre Drummond to Patrick Williams to Zach LaVine. 

Speaking of LaVine, he’s still on the roster, as is Nikola Vucevic, which begs the exact question NBA guru Zach Lowe asked on a recent podcast: 

“What is this team.” 

Lowe roasted the Bulls for a solid five minutes (it starts at the around the 55:30 mark) with a rant that should be cathartic to fans who have been saying the same things for a long time. 

Zach Lowe speaks well known truths about the Chicago Bulls 

Lowe started his takedown by saying about the DeMar DeRozan debacle, “this is an absolute disaster for the Bulls.” 

You can read my assessment of the DeRozan misadventure here, and Lowe added things that will have all Bulls fans nodding along. 

The trade came too late. Check. They got the worst return in the deal. Check. 

The Bulls should have traded DeRozan a long time ago, reaped some assets and started what they now seem to have stumbled into by accident. I’m not sure if this was a planned rebuild or just a team crumbling from the weight of its own mistakes. 

The Bulls did get a decent player in Jalen Smith in free agency, who I like, but the deal hard-capped them at the first apron and we know they aren’t going into the luxury tax, as Lowe emphatically pointed out. 

If they can’t trade LaVine and Vucevic, their roster is a defensive disaster waiting to happen but may be just good enough offensively to put themselves out of the running for a top pick.

DeRozan, Caruso and LaVine all fit a theme going back to the Jimmy Butler trade, when the Bulls paid premium value for players that should have been cheap. Who else wanted Giddey? Who else wanted Zach LaVine after having surgery? It’s a pattern of losing trades and deals that has put the Bulls in the spot they are in. 

So, when you ask, “what is this team?” the answer is that I’m not sure anyone knows, including the people making the decisions. Hopefully, the Bulls will bumble into a successful tank job and land a franchise-altering talent in the 2025 draft, but if history tells us anything, they’ll do just enough to ensure that doesn’t happen.