Guru wrote:League Circles wrote:MrSparkle wrote:
Are you kidding? Lol - what more do you need to see it doesn't work? No one in the Bulls is building around LaVine anymore. Him and Lonzo are baggage until they're off the roster. At this point the Bulls would be lucky to dump him for expiring contracts.
The Bulls are definitely building around/with Lavine until/unless they trade him, which is now probably a year away at earliest. He makes an enormous salary and put up great numbers before his 25 games of relatively poor play this season. He was very good after the deadline last year. He will be penciled in as the starting SG making his huge bucks and playing 35 mpg and taking lots of shots indefinitely now. They will and should do everything they can to make it work with him going into next year.
It's the only route. He can ask for a trade next year when he's pretending like he's bought in and scoring 25 a game.
If NBA roster management was easy it wouldn't be worth following or fun. This is frustrating and hard and fluid and that's why we are all paying attention.....it's fun.
We've both been here over 2 decades. I think there are phases where this certainly stops being fun. I think 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 were pretty dismal. I guess some optimistic times followed, but we'd need the mother of all lucky breaks to make this one fun. Problem the FO isn't even giving itself a chance for the break. They looks poised to slug on with Demar, Caruso and Vuc, which means we're looking at adding a 13-16th pick and a 1st round exit at best, and zero cap-space or 2nd rounders.
The only bright side to Zach's situation, is it wasn't another ACL tear. That probably would've been the death blow to ever moving the contract. But going by this medical staff's work, it seems to be they've been playing guys through some injuries that they shouldn't have been playing through, and who knows how lingering this foot injury is going to be. Surgeries go both ways; they can make things better, or worse.
But there's no building around Zach anymore. This injury just pushes the timeline of moving him another year. His $45m is an albatross at this point, as was the worst-case prediction. It doesn't make sense to operate over the cap anymore. Our most expensive salaries are our worst salaries. They should figure out how to get rid of all of them by summer 2025, so that they can add 2 max FAs to Coby, Ayo and whatever other cheap chips (Caruso, Pat, Phillips). That makes sense to me. Adding any players with Zach in mind makes no sense. In fact, I'd pursue a "shooting" guard as early as this summer (not really - we need the BPA).