puja21 wrote:
Lonzo's missed 211 games (and counting) in 3 seasons and 5 playoff games while counting 16% of the cap.
Bulls are maybe a top-4 seed if Lonzo and Caruso are healthy but they aren't getting to the Conf Finals anyway.
Bulls won 39 games this season thanks to the emergence of Coby White in the backcourt. If you give some Caruso and some White minutes to Ball you think they're suddenly going to win 10 more games?
His PER puts him as a below average starter. Now, yes, he's a solid defender so you can excuse that but he had 2.2 win shares out of 35 games played. Even in the "big" season he had the year prior (why you guys gave him that contract) -- the one season when his PER was over 15 (15.2) -- he still only had 3.2 win shares out of 55 games played. Add that up and he added 5.4 wins over the last 90 games he played. So even if he did somehow play a full season his WS will probably be around 5. And yet somehow he's going to add 10 wins to the Bulls by taking minutes from 2 of their best players?
By contrast, when Derrick Rose got his max extension he was coming off a season with 13.1 WS and a 23.5 PER, not to mention an MVP award and a first team all-nba spot to go with his 2nd allstar appearance. Most importantly, he had only missed 6 games in his career up to that point. Ball had already missed more than 90 games before he signed with the Bulls. He only had one season where he cracked 60 games played. 35 may have been an aberration but considering he averaged 54 a season to that point, was it really that unexpected for him to suffer an injury?
