Who the Chicago Bulls truly are

The last two seasons have been weird and completely comprehensible at the same time.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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La Maja Vestida; Francisco Goya; 1800-05

The 2021-22 Chicago Bulls: No. 13 in offense, No. 22 in defense — rankings befitting a team led by DeMar DeRozan effectively playing power forward, Nikola Vucevic in the middle and Zach LaVine on the wing. The Bulls finished 46-36 … despite a scoring margin that indicated the quality of a 40-42 team. This skew included a bevy of extremely clutch finishes by DeRozan. After narrowly finished sixth in the conference, the Bulls were ejected quickly (4-1) by the defending champ Milwaukee Bucks. After splitting the opening pair of games in Milwaukee, the Bucks won the final three of the series by an average of 20 points.

The 2022-23 Chicago Bulls: No. 24 offense, No. 5 defense. The team finished 40-42 … despite a scoring margin that indicated the quality of a 44-38 team. The Bulls finished No. 10 in the conference. They won their first play-in game over the Raptors on the strength of DeRozan’s daughter’s screeches. They fell in the second play-in to the eventual Eastern Conference champs.

What’s fascinating to me is how little actually changed for the Bulls in these two seasons. Obviously, the roster changed little with the major exceptions being that Lonzo Ball did play 35 games in 2021-22 and zero in 2022-23, and Patrick Williams played 17 games in ‘21-22 and 82 in ‘22-23. Looking at the full roster, 81% of the minutes individual Bulls players registered in ‘21-22 returned to action in ‘22-23. Other than Ball, the Bull with the most minutes in ‘21-22 that didn’t appear for Chicago in ‘22-23 was Troy Brown Jr., who played 1,055 minutes.

It’s easy to assume Ball’s partial presence in ‘21-22 helped juice those offensive numbers. But even taken that partial season, it’s remarkable how similar the categorical statistics are in the consecutive seasons teamwide.