Assembling Core 2.0

[TheSuzerain]

There's plenty of good players who are below average defensively. Fun fact: Lauri shot 48% from the field and 34% from 3 during that "one hot month." I'd hardly call that hot, and I definitely wouldn't call it unsustainable, speaking purely from an efficiency point of view.

You can get a top 10 talent for a whole hell of a lot less than $90 million guaranteed dollars. That's the type of foolish risk that can cripple a franchise financially if it fails. It would make Felicio look like a value contract.

THT was a 2nd round pick. There's absolutely no evidence he's a top 10 talent, and there's even less evidence that he's worth $90 mil. I'm all for taking a chance on young, underutilized players with upside, but if that's anywhere near the asking price I'll look elsewhere.

You balk at the thought of paying a guy like Lauri $13 mil per season, but you want to empty the bag for a guy who has proven essentially nothing so far. Basically, you're paying him all that money simply because he's an unknown quantity. Imagine if some team drove the Brinks truck up to Gerald Green's house back in the day.

This is just the extreme opposite of GarPax. Instead of extreme conservatism and playing it safe, this is extreme "swing for the fences," both equally incompetent. I fully understand the desire to acquire athletic, lengthy, versatile, multidimensional talents, but this ain't it.

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There is nothing that risky about paying THT big money if we're resetting the rebuild clock. It will only "prevent" us from making Thad/Sato/Felicio type signings.

I really doubt you can get a top 10 talent for much less than $90 million. That's closer to the actual true market value of such a prospect. And even if it's a bit of an overpay, we're in a cap position where there is ample cap space. And we have nobody really important to re-up until PWill in 2025. We're on a bit of a free-roll for a while.

THT is definitely a better prospect than Lauri. More defensive value almost by default. Far better ball skills. Likely a worse shooter, but THT is better at shooting than Lauri is at his secondary traits.

Just to be clear, you think a 2nd round pick who has played a whopping 8 career NBA games is a vastly superior prospect to a 7th overall pick who was the quickest player to make 100 3s, made the all rookie first team, averaged 19 and 9 in his second season, and had a month of averaging 26 and 12?

I think you may be reading a tad bit too much into 1 preseason game and the LA effect.

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Yes. I do think he's a better prospect than Lauri. Terence Davis too.

I see Lauri's path to being a positive player as very narrow (high volume 3's at 40%+). Would not at all be surprised if Lauri never becomes a positive player.

[TheSuzerain]

THT is definitely a better prospect than Lauri. More defensive value almost by default. Far better ball skills. Likely a worse shooter, but THT is better at shooting than Lauri is at his secondary traits.

You watched just one youtube clip and claim he is a better prospect or did you actually follow him from hs to say he is a top 10 prospect?
Offering him 4/90 and waiving Lauri seems like a terrible gming more like 2k. Lakers are crap outside of their top 2 and if THT doesnt start, that tells me he isnt a great prospect.

I've been aware of him since Simeon.

Lakers aren't crap outside of their top 2. They just won a title rather easily. And now have signed Schroder and Harrell. Caruso and KCP are good role players.

[PhilLeotardo]

Spoiler:

THT is definitely a better prospect than Lauri. More defensive value almost by default. Far better ball skills. Likely a worse shooter, but THT is better at shooting than Lauri is at his secondary traits.

You watched just one youtube clip and claim he is a better prospect or did you actually follow him from hs to say he is a top 10 prospect?
Offering him 4/90 and waiving Lauri seems like a terrible gming more like 2k. Lakers are crap outside of their top 2 and if THT doesnt start, that tells me he isnt a great prospect.

I've been aware of him since Simeon.

Lakers aren't crap outside of their top 2. They just won a title rather easily. And now have signed Schroder and Harrell. Caruso and KCP are good role players.

....they “won” a glorified summer league tourney that no one watched lol..

[Southpaw]

I like the premise of the OP to reset the core and tank for '21 and '22 while targeting underutilized young players still with upside but paying that much for THT is a no go for me. The Spurs could be a good team to watch because they have a bunch of young guards/wings that would need minutes in Murray/White/Walker/Vassel. I also think we'd need to sign more vets a la Temple, who are fairly cheap but can still play because it's clear that having too much youth is bad for player development. We need vets who can show them the ropes.

[PlayerUp]

Sounds like a good plan to me. It's what I would have done before the season started.

The fact that the Bulls haven't had a single Top 50 Player in the entire NBA for the past 4 seasons is mind boggling.

[DuckIII]

I wouldn’t be in too big a hurry to break this team up. The individual players may be struggling but the pieces just fit together so perfectly that it’s hard to give up on this type of fluid chemistry.

[ShadyMoney]

From what I understand, Tucker is Lebron’s special project. It would be hard to pry him loose.

If the Lakers matched a 4-year $90 million deal, they would be on the hook for something like $35 million for THT in 2023.

We could make it extremely painful financially for the Lakers to keep THT.

I don’t want any klutz sports players at all

[Chicago-Bull-E]

I don’t think you can get a second high 1st rounder by trading one year of Lavine, 1/2 year of Lauri and 1 year of WCJ. I think maybe a middle round pick for Lavine, which I would do.

Bulls need to suck, and let’s say they get top 3, and take Suggs or Cade.

I think there are young marquee free agents the Bulls can go after. He’s polarizing, but I’d offer Collins 4/100 and let Lauri walk. Because the rest of the core will be so young with rookie deals, the Bulls can afford at least one large contract that won’t hurt their cap flexibility too much. Let Thad walk, he’s been worthless, and keep Sato.

Also offer 4/60 to Jarret Allen, who I think is crazy underrated. Snatch George Hill as his next year contract is on a partial deal that I think gets declined.

Bulls draft Suggs, and with the Lavine pick, draft Bouknight.

Suggs, White, Hill
Hill, Bouknight
Williams, Sato
Collins, Williams
Allen, WCJ

That team has a lot of defense, a big time playmaker, and a few guys that will put up 20 a game.

[stl705]

OP i feel you are spot on. The Bulls rebuild has been so incredibly poor, they’re about to be left with either nothing or a 100M contract for Lauri.

The right move was to keep trading these young guys we’ve got. Singularly, Lavine has talent and trade value. Laurie used to have trade value. Carter jr used to have trade value.

Bulls have ran their assets into dirt and are now left with barely anything of value.

Trade em all and gamble with draft picks again.

[sco]

I still think the best option is giving our young guys time to figure out the new system. Lauri and Zach are playing sufficiently well to keep their trade value high. Trade Lauri and Otto at the deadline for whatever we can get, but nobody should expect anything better then retread young marginal starters back or picks in late 20's, but fine. It's likely that neither White or Carter are starting talents, but I'm fine giving them 2-3 months to play for their careers, if they fail, fine, at least we'll definitively know they are two more Bobby Portis-level talents and we can bench them and move on...there's the upside of a top 4 pick opportunity.

We go into next season with Zach and maybe a decent player in PWill (I'm not too excited yet). We'll have 2 max slots to either sign or trade for really good players plus 1 good pick and maybe a couple of late 1st's. If we can't nab great players, we can sign or trade for guys on to punt the $ down the road a year or two to get 2 great players.

Here's what I have learned from Core 1.0. Continuing to have high draft picks and starting them doesn't work, because you really can't develop more than 1 or 2 guys with less than 5 years of experience and be a good team.

[Dresden]

I don’t think you can get a second high 1st rounder by trading one year of Lavine, 1/2 year of Lauri and 1 year of WCJ. I think maybe a middle round pick for Lavine, which I would do.

Bulls need to suck, and let’s say they get top 3, and take Suggs or Cade.

That's where Paxson went badly wrong- we never got bad enough to get a top 3 pick. Mr. Sparkle pointed this out in the other thread, but just those few spots we dropped in the lottery in the Doncic draft meant the difference between, at WORST, getting a good core player like JJJ, and getting a dud like Wendell. And at best, we could have gotten a generational talent like Luka.

Same thing happened the next year- we end up picking 7th again, and miss out on Zion, Ja, and RJ Barrett.

We finally got lucky in the lottery and perhaps have come away with a core piece, although that's far, far from certain. This time next year we might be talking about seeing what we can get for PWill, too.

I don't see anyway to salvage this team, except to start from scratch and try to accumulate some high picks. And do a good job of tanking. Of course, it's always possible that this team improves over the course of the year, and we DO have some good players. We won't have much of an option but to let this year play out. But we can't wait another 2-3 years thinking that they just need more time.

[dougthonus]

I've generally had this plan all off-season.
1: Offer Zach a max extension (adds 3/75 onto his deal) if he says no, trade him immediately for the most you can get. Either the Bulls didn't offer or Zach said no. So trade LaVine for as much as you can get now.

2: Trade Lauri for as much as you can get.

3: Trade Coby / Wendell if you feel you can get good value.

4: Trade Sato/Thad if you can get expirings + anything good (even 2nd rounders).

5: Use your massive cap room in 2021 do all you can to get extra picks.

Rebuild as if you have absolutely nothing on the roster at this point.

[coldfish]

I wouldn’t be in too big a hurry to break this team up. The individual players may be struggling but the pieces just fit together so perfectly that it’s hard to give up on this type of fluid chemistry.

Now you are testing my sarcasm detector.

[PlayerUp]

We can never compete with other teams until we change the way we're doing things. Gar/Pax completely drove this team into the ground and caused irreparable damage to this organization. Every single aspect of how they were running this team top to bottom was so poorly done. Only way to move forward is do a complete rebuild top to bottom. If AKME don't see that, they should see that in the next 10-30 games as we sit at the bottom of the NBA and more frustration builds up. Get whatever value you can back and lets move forward. I'm perfectly fine doing a complete rebuild. It's better than watching a team stuck in basketball hell.

[TheSuzerain]

I've generally had this plan all off-season.
1: Offer Zach a max extension (adds 3/75 onto his deal) if he says no, trade him immediately for the most you can get. Either the Bulls didn't offer or Zach said no. So trade LaVine for as much as you can get now.

2: Trade Lauri for as much as you can get.

3: Trade Coby / Wendell if you feel you can get good value.

4: Trade Sato/Thad if you can get expirings + anything good (even 2nd rounders).

5: Use your massive cap room in 2021 do all you can to get extra picks.

Rebuild as if you have absolutely nothing on the roster at this point.

No chance Zach accepts that extension, so this is basically the scorched earth approach. I like it.

Wiggins is the perfect bad contract for us to eat. We could get legit value back. And it expires with 1-year left on Patrick Williams deal which would be the most opportune time for us to make big moves.

[TheSuzerain]

I like the premise of the OP to reset the core and tank for '21 and '22 while targeting underutilized young players still with upside but paying that much for THT is a no go for me. The Spurs could be a good team to watch because they have a bunch of young guards/wings that would need minutes in Murray/White/Walker/Vassel. I also think we'd need to sign more vets a la Temple, who are fairly cheap but can still play because it's clear that having too much youth is bad for player development. We need vets who can show them the ropes.

It is a lot of money. But we truly don't have many useful ways to invest our cap room right now, so the price tag shouldn't hurt as much.

I really think you can acquire good vets for the veteran's minimum contract which is $2.5 million for experienced vets. There are plenty of guys who have good intangibles and play the right way that you can snag at that price.

Just this past offseason, all of the following players signed for the Vet Min:

- Nic Batum
- Jared Dudley
- Delly
- Raul neto
- Torrey Craig

[PlayerUp]

Here's what I have learned from Core 1.0. Continuing to have high draft picks and starting them doesn't work, because you really can't develop more than 1 or 2 guys with less than 5 years of experience and be a good team.

Right so this is totally wrong here.

Jordan, Pippen, Grant perfect example.
Curry, Klay, Green another example.

The key is maximizing your picks, making trades and drafting high ceiling players. Once you finally have a star talent, then you pair them with veterans. Gar/Pax focused on low ceiling players like Wendell, Valentine, McDermott, Snell, Teague, Zipser, Bairstow, Murphy. This resulted in Core 1.0 failing.

[sco]

Here's what I have learned from Core 1.0. Continuing to have high draft picks and starting them doesn't work, because you really can't develop more than 1 or 2 guys with less than 5 years of experience and be a good team.

Right so this is totally wrong here.

Jordan, Pippen, Grant perfect example.
Curry, Klay, Green another example.

The key is maximizing your picks, making trades and drafting high ceiling players. Once you finally have a star talent, then you pair them with veterans. Gar/Pax focused on low ceiling players like Wendell, Valentine, McDermott, Snell, Teague, Zipser, Bairstow, Murphy. This resulted in Core 1.0 failing.

Yeah, it took a decade after Jordan to win a championship. You are so [insert your choice of offensive word] here.

[PlayerUp]

Here's what I have learned from Core 1.0. Continuing to have high draft picks and starting them doesn't work, because you really can't develop more than 1 or 2 guys with less than 5 years of experience and be a good team.

Right so this is totally wrong here.

Jordan, Pippen, Grant perfect example.
Curry, Klay, Green another example.

The key is maximizing your picks, making trades and drafting high ceiling players. Once you finally have a star talent, then you pair them with veterans. Gar/Pax focused on low ceiling players like Wendell, Valentine, McDermott, Snell, Teague, Zipser, Bairstow, Murphy. This resulted in Core 1.0 failing.

Yeah, it took a decade after Jordan to win a championship. You are so [insert your choice of offensive word] here.

Regardless, we don't have good enough high ceiling young talent to pair with veterans. That's ultimately why Core 1.0 is failing. Look at Memphis as an example. All it took was drafting Ja Morant and the team was too good to tank. If you focus on loading up on picks, you'll eventually land your gem. If you focus on low ceiling prospects and don't make moves to position yourself in the draft to maximize getting the most value out of the draft, well you end being the current Bulls team.

[ArtMorte]

So, the only core piece is the guy who has played two NBA games and the number one target in free agency should be a guy who has at the moment played eight NBA games, with a career-high of 14 points in them.

Sorry, but this is just full-on video game mode.