Bulls: Divine On West Coast Trip, LaVine Looks More Like Top Talent Than Ever
Zach LaVine’s hands are still smoldering from the fires he set inside the Staples Center last weekend, and yet that’s the guy some people say the Chicago Bulls should trade?
The same guy who hung 45 points with 10 treys on Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and the Los Angeles Clippers two nights after lighting up LeBron James and the defending champion Lakers for 38 points?
The steadily improving 25-year-old who is currently the third-leading scorer in the NBA, behind only Bradley Beal and Steph Curry?
That’s the guy who some people suggest should start vetting local moving companies?
No...that guy is a diamond in the rough. You don’t trade those. In fact, you don’t touch them at all. You build around them and keep doing so until you find a style that best accentuates their brilliance.
It’s a process and it’s one the Bulls have made more tedious than it needed to be since acquiring LaVine (in a trade with Chicago's previous franchise talent, Jimmy Butler).
Thanks to clumsy coaching, injuries to core players Otto Porter Jr., Wendell Carter Jr. and Lauri Markkanen, and the underwhelming play of the latter two when they were healthy enough take the court last year, many think the Bulls are destined to only go so far. But considering how competitive the Bulls have been of late even with Porter Jr. (back spasms) and Markkanen (left calf contusion, health and safety protocol) again missing time, those people should clearly recognize the value in keeping LaVine around while team president Arturas Karnisovas attempts to restore this once proud franchise.
Look, it’s not like elite scorers who can draw defenders out past the three-point line, knock down mid-range jumpers and finish an elbow’s length above the rim — even on a surgically repaired left knee — are a dime a dozen. Or that the list of Bulls who’ve tallied the most first-half points and recorded a season’s highest scoring average since Michael Jordan is long. Or that any other Bull has ever once made 10 or more shots from beyond the arc. Much less twice.
Simply put, LaVine is special. He is as polished an offensive threat as any of the best scorers — Ben Gordon, Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler — that have occupied the Bulls' roster in the time after Jordan’s second retirement. He needs only for the talent around him to improve, to apply his off-season defensive drill work more consistently in games, tighten his ball security, and figure out how to weaponize his own strengths for the betterment of his teammates in order to finally shed his label as an empty-calorie scorer.
So far in playing for a proven coach in Billy Donovan and with teammates who are playing like they’ve got everything to lose, LaVine has settled into career-highs in points, rebounds, assists, and field-goal percentage. Those numbers have helped propel the Bulls in some vital ways, such as the team's 15th-ranked offensive efficiency rating in the league, a clear improvement on their 27th ranking from last season. Neither has translated into the win-loss column yet, but do you remember the last time the Bulls caused this amount of stir from a four-game stretch in which they went 1-3? Without two of their top six players? During a West Coast swing?
Had it not been for flimsy defense, weak ball handling and mental lapses LaVine may not have even had to take that last-second shot that would’ve beaten the Lakers or the one that would’ve pushed the Clippers into overtime.
The results of their trip out West speak to both the progress they’ve made and the room the Bulls have left to grow. They will likely continue to toggle between growth and growing pains this season with a roster not quite equal in talent to that of even their own central division foes, let alone the Brooklyn’s, Boston’s and Philadelphia’s in the rest of the Eastern Conference.
Those squads have decorated dynamic duos — in the Nets' case, now half a murderer’s row in Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the newly acquired James Harden — at the ready.
Trading LaVine -- that guy who is the closest thing the Bulls have to those superstars -- isn’t the answer. Finding another real star to pair with him is.