While the Celtics, Heat, Mavs, and Warriors continue their journey for the Larry O’Brien trophy, the rest of the league is sidelined and resorting to day dreaming about what moves their team might make this off-season. Most of this stuff, especially early on, is just coming out of left field, someone tries to draw connections between what GM’s have done in the past and Instagram or Twitter posts from players. It’s all just a bunch of non-sense but it gives us something to discuss while we wait for our teams to actually do something.
There have been a couple of trade rumors and ideas tossed around on Twitter surrounding the Bulls, so I decided to weigh in on the two that I have seen most recently. One of them, I like a lot better than the other, but whether either of them actually make sense is to be determined. Of course, the biggest question of the Bulls’ off-season still remains: What will happen with Zach Lavine?
Today, tweets have been surfacing regarding Marc Eversley’s (Bulls GM) affection for Matisse Thybule and his connection to the Sixers before coming to Chicago. There hasn’t been (at least that I have seen) any realistic proposed trades surrounding this, but this is a move that really wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to me unless we were giving up some real deep bench guys, which I do not see the Sixers going for. No disrespect to Thybule, I actually like him a lot, but I don’t think he serves a need for this Bulls team. The Bulls are already fairly solid defensively, what they need is better shooting and more of a post presence on defense. Thybule doesn’t fill either of those voids. He is an elite defender, but we need someone to stop (OK, slow down) Giannis and Embiid, he’s not that guy. I don’t see the Bulls shaking up the roster to bring in a fairly one dimensional player. Thybule has shown flashes of offensive relevancy, but it’s very inconsistent and doesn’t seem to be a great fit with the Bulls.
The hypothetical trade that I am more interested in, came from Greg Williams on Twitter:
As much as I want Coby White to stay in Chicago, the keyboard warriors on twitter seem to disagree with me. Truly, I think Coby is going to blossom into a dynamic player when given the right opportunity and for that reason I hope we do hold on to him, but if the Bulls were to ship him off, this would be the type of return I would hope to get.
Ayton is a dependable big who can anchor the defense and slow down the elite bigs in the east – Giannis, Embiid, Bam. He is young enough to continue to develop with this young core of Lonzo Ball, Patrick Williams, Ayo Dosunmu, *Normally Coby would be on this list*, and if Zach Lavine decides to stick around. Dario Saric is a bigger body who can replace the floor spacing that you lose by giving up Vucevic. This would create a lineup that looks something like this:
PG: Lonzo Ball
SG: DeMar DeRozan
SF: Zach Lavine
PF: Patrick Williams
C: Deandre Ayton
That would be a pretty elite defensive team assuming Lavine continues his defensive efforts after he gets paid. If Lavine decides to move on, I like to think we would get some sort of return for him in a sign and trade, but for fun let’s say we don’t.
PG: Lonzo Ball
SG: Ayo Dosunmu
SF: DeMar DeRozan
PF: Patrick Williams
C: Deandre Ayton
That still looks like a decent lineup to me, but again, I would think we could get a return for Zach via a sign and trade to plug into either the SG or SF slot instead of Ayo being thrust into the starting lineup, if that’s the way things go down this offseason.
I expect the Bulls to have a different look next year, as I have said in previous posts, but whether that all takes place this off season or throughout the beginning of the regular season is yet to be determined. Zach Lavine is the first big domino. Whatever happens with him is going to decide the direction of this team moving forward.
We will see what sort of magic Arturas and company stir up this off-season, for now, we have to stick with the talk around the water cooler until anything official happens. As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to discussing the many trade machine proposals that are thrown out in the coming weeks/months.
Jacob Grenemeier
May 19th 2022
Chicago Hoop Heads 
