The Bulls are in the early stages of another rebuild. They’ve said goodbye to Nikola Vučević, Coby White, Ayo Dosunmu and Kevin Huerter and hope building-blocks Josh Giddey and Matas Buzelis with help from future draft picks will move them closer to a championship.
On Tuesday, the Bulls faced a team that executed one of the best rebuilds in recent memory, losing to the defending-champion Thunder 116-108 in front of an announced United Center crowd of 18,561.
Buzelis, who had 11 points and five rebounds, rolled his right ankle and didn’t play after leaving with 19.2 seconds remaining in the third. Giddey also rolled an ankle late in the third but did play in the fourth, finishing with 14 points, 10 assists and nine rebounds to narrowly miss a triple-double.
Bulls coach Billy Donovan said Buzelis and Giddey both suffered ankle sprains and are day-to-day.
“[Wednesday], we’ll have a much better feel on both of them,” Donovan said.
Buzelis, who’s played in every game this season, thinks he’ll be ready for Thursday in Phoenix.
“I want to play every game,” Buzelis said. “We’ll see how it feels and we’ll go from there.”
The Thunder have already gone pretty far down the road the Bulls are hoping to travel.
Oklahoma City planted a seed for its project in 2019 when it acquired future MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a handful of first-round picks as part of a trade that sent Paul George to the Clippers. Oklahoma City subsequently drafted Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams in 2022, assembling the core of a championship team that only needed time to mature together and a few well-planned acquisitions to complete the cast and earn a ring.
Following that blueprint won’t be easy for the Bulls, or anybody else.
The Thunder were lucky that Kawhi Leonard wanted the Clippers to acquire George, stripping Los Angeles of any leverage, something Oklahoma City executive Sam Presti exploited beautifully. The Thunder were fortunate that Gilgeous-Alexander (who missed Tuesday night’s game with an abdominal strain) grew from an 11th overall pick to one of the best players on the planet, though he was aided by the Thunder’s development infrastructure.
“Every situation’s different, so I don’t know if anything’s replicable. Situations change based on a million different things, a million different factors,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “Our success is a lot of work and certainly a lot of work by our players. But we’ve had a lot of luck, and I’m very careful because of that to come up here and give any sort of advice or speak from a level of standing that I don’t think is appropriate.
“Their situation is different than ours, just like everybody. You need good fortune in different ways, and we’ve had it.”
Donovan echoed what Daigneault said, praising Oklahoma City’s drafting and development
“It probably went a lot faster than they thought,” Donovan said.
That’s what the Bulls would like to experience. They don’t want to become a team like the Jazz or Wizards, franchises that have been stuck in perpetual rebuilds hoping for lottery luck annually.
“We’re in a spot where we’re trying to build out,” Donovan said. “A lot of it comes down to, you have to have good fortune. You want to develop the players that are already inside your organization. You want guys to be able to continue to grow. You want the chemistry on your team to be really, really good. You want guys to have the kind of mentality and the competitive makeup that you want to have and who you want to be as a team.”