This past season was a rough one for the Chicago Bulls, who were eliminated in the play-in tournament just one year after snapping a four-year playoff drought. Unfortunately, it’s looking like their core of Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic isn’t good enough to bring a championship to Chicago.
In fact, that core may not be good enough to consistently earn a spot in the Eastern Conference playoffs. Despite that, Arturas Karnisovas seems determined to keep the core together. If that’s the plan, he needs to improve the team around the trio. During the same press conference in which he spoke about his lack of desire for a rebuild, he admitted Chicago’s 3-point shooting needs to change.
Chicago was one of the worst 3-point shooting teams in the league this past season, and in an NBA where the outside shot is king, the Bulls will struggle to win if that continues to be the case. NBC Sports Chicago’s KC Johnson wrote about Karnisovas’ intentions in a recent article.
“But executive vice president Artūras Karnišovas acknowledged the need for the Bulls to change their shot profile and address league-worst 3-point shooting in his season-ending news conference,” Johnson wrote. “While Karnišovas said he isn’t focused on another full rebuild, he did acknowledge his ‘responsibility is to look at everything’ at that same mid-April news conferece.”
LaVine and Vucevic are solid outside shooters, but DeRozan prefers to live in the mid-range. And outside of the former two, the Bulls don’t have many efficient shooters on the roster.
