The Chicago Bulls offseason has been a downer, to say the least. The face of their team, DeMar DeRozan, is now a Sacramento King, and questions abound for players who fell below him on the locker room hierarchy. Alex Caruso and Andre Drummond are already gone, and Nikola Vucevic might as well have a ‘For Sale’ sign attached to him. With all the movement and chaos that has characterized the Chicago Bulls offseason, it is definitely surprising that Zach LaVine is still on the roster.
New reports have come out that lead to the expectation that LaVine will start the season as a Chicago Bull. Multiple reports throughout the offseason tied LaVine to teams on the West Coast looking to add an offensive weapon, and to struggling teams looking to extract draft capital from the Bulls for taking on LaVine’s onerous contract. As the 2024-25 season gets closer, those rumors have died down, and it is now expected that Zach LaVine will end a noisy offseason still in the Windy City.
Contractual anvil for Chicago Bulls
Zach LaVine will likely bookend an underwhelming era for the Chicago Bulls. He was brought to the Windy City in the trade that sent Jimmy Butler to Minnesota in 2017. The move cemented the end of the Bulls’ attempt to contend in the East, ending an era that had been headlined by the Derrick Rose experience. For many seasons, LaVine was the leading act on a terrible team that was desperate for relevance and acclaim. Along the way, LaVine signed a pair of lucrative contracts and made a pair of All-Star teams, but failed to deliver any meaningful results for the team. As the team looks to move on from LaVine, he will end his tenure in Chicago without impacting the Eastern Conference or improving the organizational culture of the Bulls.
As Arturus Karnisovas and Marc Everlsey came into power with the Chicago Bulls, they tried to put viable options around LaVine. They acquired DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic, signed Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso, and brought in Billy Donovan as head coach to bolster his supporting cast. Although it was a somewhat convoluted way of assembling a modern basketball team, the Bulls were hopeful that they were back on track to becoming a threat in the East, with a team centered around LaVine.
What could have been
When this did not come to pass and the team began to come apart at the seams this offseason, LaVine escaped the chopping block. He has now seen DeRozan and Caruso jettisoned out of Chicago, but is unlikely to suffer the same fate himself. Despite their best efforts, the Bulls have been unable to unload LaVine in a trade this offseason. As this iteration of the Bulls comes to a close, fans can say that Zach LaVine presided over one of the more uneventful and underwhelming eras in recent Chicago Bulls history.
Chicago has tried to send him to both Los Angeles teams, as he had been linked to both in recent years with plenty of trade speculation. Neither was interested in LaVine, who played in just 25 games during the 2023-24 campaign. As aging teams, more injury concerns were not high on the priorities for the Lakers or Clippers. Then Chicago looked upstate at the Golden State Warriors. Needing to replace Klay Thompson, the Bulls offered LaVine and draft capital in a deal centered around either Chris Paul or Andrew Wiggins, but the Warriors declined and opted to just waive Paul instead.
Zach LaVine offers intriguing options
The salary component of completing a LaVine trade is weighing overall negotiations. Even after the California teams passed on the former All-Star, the Bulls went looking for other trade partners, this time lowering their expectations to see a return befitting a salary dump trade. Still, the Detroit Pistons and Washington Wizards were not interested, even with the inclusion of valuable draft picks to try and sweeten the deal. After a league-wide trade machine tour, the Bulls are resigned to the fact that Zach LaVine and his $43M salary will still be on the team when this upcoming season begins.
Marc Stein reported on Friday that, “League sources say that the Bulls are thus resigned to the fact that they will likely be forced to start the new season with LaVine on the roster and take it a step further by trying to help him rebuild some trade value after months of fruitless efforts to find a new home via trade.”
Zach LaVine came out of UCLA as a raw prospect with loads of upside. After showing signs of great athleticism, agility, and quickness, he was given the keys to a team and told to turn it into something great. Seven years, multiple injuries, and an Albatross mega-contract extension later, the Chicago Bulls are put in a position where they cannot find anyone willing to add LaVine to their locker room. Throwing in draft picks didn’t even entice a team to take a chance on the 29-year-old shooting guard, leading to what is going to be an awkward start to the 2024-25 season for the Chicago Bulls.
