The Chicago Bulls are embarking on a complete rebuild, but two of their current players are standing in the way of their success.
You could say Zach LaVine fits right in with the youth movement, but Nikola Vucević is clearly a special case. Chicago has been trying to trade Vucević for weeks, but to no avail. No one wants to address Vucević’s poor defense, an unfortunate aspect of his game that has caused his stock to plummet.
Vucević is a tough sell on the transfer market because he is overpaid. He is also overrated, according to Grant Hughes of Bleacher Report, who, in an interview new article On Tuesday, Vucević was ranked the fourth most overrated NBA player of the past five years.
“The Chicago Bulls certainly overrated Nikola Vučević when they sent Wendell Carter Jr., Otto Porter Jr. and a pair of future first-round picks to bring him in 2021,” Hughes said.
“Vučević has been a player who has mostly been a calorie-depleting stat-cruncher… he is essentially a highly-demanded offensive player who cannot score effectively because he never draws fouls, doesn’t shoot enough three-pointers and converts his weak field goal attempts at a mediocre rate. The 33-year-old’s steady diet of mid-range shooting is offensive poison, and he has been a catastrophic negative force on defense in three of the last five years.”
“In hindsight, the Bulls should have seen that last game coming. In his final season with the Magic, their defensive rating dropped 8.2 points per 100 possessions when Vučević was on the court. At least the Bulls didn’t throw money out the window by signing him to a three-year, $60 million extension in the summer of 2023. Oh, wait…”
Will Chicago be able to find a new home for Vucević before the start of the 2024-25 season?
Vucević is more likely to stay put, putting head coach Billy Donovan in an interesting position as he balances the Bulls being bad with the Bulls being terrible.
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