The Chicago Bulls had to make some difficult choices last summer on which players they could afford to keep around after a whopping nine of their teammates from the previous season entered free agency. The Bulls persuaded Andre Drummond to accept his player option, signed Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu to incredibly team-friendly contracts, and all of these moves are already looking very good in hindsight.
Nevertheless, Nikola Vucevic, arguably Chicago’s most contentious summer acquisition, hasn’t yet lived up to the expectations of his huge contract. The Bulls had anticipated that Vucevic, who inked a three-year, $60 million agreement, would continue to be a vital member of this squad at centre.
This summer, a lot of Bulls supporters were disappointed that Vucevic was re-signed when the team was obviously in need of a rebuild, or at the absolute least, a retool. If Nikola could maintain his 2022–2023 level of play, his contract didn’t seem all that horrible in comparison to the deals other players signed during free agency.
It appears that he was unable to maintain his current level of performance after all. This season, Vucevic’s efficiency numbers have drastically decreased. His field goal percentage has dropped five percentage points, and his already-mediocre three-point percentage has dropped an incredible 7.5% all the way down to 27.5%, despite the fact that he is averaging almost the same number of points, rebounds, and assists as he did a year ago.
Since his rookie season, Vucevic’s true shooting percentage has been the lowest of his career. Twelve years into his NBA career and at thirty-three years old, there’s not much reason to think he’ll be improving much anytime soon.
Since the summer, I have had my doubts about the choice to re-sign Vucevic, but nothing makes it clearer than the performance of the team against the Cavaliers last night. Vucevic responded by scoring just 9 points on an embarrassingly low 4-for-16 shooting clip and getting the lowest plus/minus of any player on either team, right when the Bulls could have used him to have a big game.
After one particularly bad game, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt since even the best players have bad nights. The problem, though, is that there was nothing particularly unique about the outing from last night. This particular game revealed a really alarming downward trend in his skills. Furthermore,.
The most annoying thing of all, maybe, was that Vucevic had an opportunity to prove himself in the closing minutes of the game the previous night. With 17 seconds left, down 103-14, Vucevic mishandled a pass from Coby White in a pick and roll that would have put the Bulls ahead. Instead, the Cavaliers safely won the game by forcing Chicago to foul moving forward.
Rather than winning a game that was truly required, the Bulls lost to an opponent from the Eastern Conference in Orlando earlier in the week. Chicago finishes with a 26-29 record and doesn’t appear to be any closer to winning it all than they have during the previous two years.
To top it all off, it appears like this new Vucevic contract will drag Chicago down for years to come, just when the Bulls were about to be released from the financial burden of Lonzo Ball’s contract. Wendell Carter and Daniel Gafford, two former Bulls centres, are helping other teams succeed, but Chicago will have to pay a 35-year-old traffic cone $20 million a year.
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