This has been a very disappointing start. With the rising sense of doom for the season, there are already a lot of posts about what moves should be made. I thought this would be relevant, but I’m still hoping that Coby, DeMar and Williams can find their shot before the season ends in the first months like the White Sox.
With DPM, you have some nice charts that show the impact over time that each player has. These are updated as of November 6, so it doesn’t take into account the win against the Jazz or last night’s loss. Not much should have changed in the trends since then.
Zach LaVine
Likely due to his injury last year, he has been trending downward from his peak in 2022. So far this season, his impact for the Bulls has stayed level from the end of last year. The chart shows him trending downward, but I think with more games it will level off. I think the main question is if you believe he already reached his peak. As a comparison, Devin Booker who has been compared to LaVine for a while has a 2.8 DPM compared to Zach’s 1.06. From this stat, it looks like Zach will not likely become more than a pretty good offensive player.
DeMar DeRozan
The good news is that DeMar has played his best basketball with the Bulls according to DPM. He also has shown some fluctuation throughout the seasons where his performance rises and falls but continues to improve. Now the bad news is that so far this season, his performance has dropped off a cliff. This has come with the Bulls trying to change the offensive approach. Now the question is if you think this is a normal fluctuation caused by a cold shooting start, if the new offensive approach has caused this and will continue to result in this kind of performance, or if this drop is age related.
Nikola Vucevic
This is and has been the scariest graph for me. This is a pretty obvious trend that seems consistent with performance as players age. It’s very, very unrealistic that he will return to his peak. The best hope is that he can continue to hover around 0 DPM or maybe improve a bit upon that as the offense improves with time, but it’s pretty obvious the best performances are behind him. I didn’t want to add my opinion to these, but I think this one is obvious that he needs to be traded if anything of value is offered and nothing dramatically improves with the team.
Alex Caruso
Now for some optimism. Caruso seemingly is still trending upward and is currently the most impactful player on the Bulls. If there are more games like last night, it may even continue to rise as the trendline indicates. On his contract, this is incredible value (as we all know).
Coby White
Continuing with the optimism despite his very cold start, Coby reached a positive DPM last year after starting the season at around -1.5. He is trending upward at a fast rate. If that holds as we expect, once he can shoot again, he will be on a great contract for several more years. When compared to LaVine’s career, there is even hope that White will reach LaVine’s level of impact during his contract as he is already a little ahead of LaVine at the start of his fifth year.
Patrick Williams
Still optimistic, Pat improved from an around -2 DPM player to a -1 over the course of last season. Even though he hasn’t looked great at all, he has maintained that level according to DPM. This season, the hope is he can continue to improve to be around a 0 DPM player. No one should expect a meteoric rise in performance this year, but we can expect him to be an okay starting level player next year if the trend continues.
Ayo Dosunmu
This is another interesting and optimistic graph. If this strong start in limited minutes is real, the Ayo bandwagon will be back strong by the end of the season. His improvement will be back on track to be around a -1 DPM player at least, which would mean he maintains his defensive impact while playing more in flow with the offense.
Andre Drummond
Drummond has had many fluctuations in performance throughout his career, but his time with the Bulls has been mostly positive. If you compare it to Vucevic’s trend, you have a strong argument that Drummond should get more minutes if Vucevic doesn’t improve over the next months. Or maybe you can get a decent return for Drummond at the deadline.
Jevon Carter
Carter also took a while to warm up with the Bulls. With the game against the Jazz, he’d likely be around 0 DPM at the moment. There is some hope that he can be a consistently +1 DPM player with more minutes, which supports having him start over White (at least until his shooting comes back). There is also the world where Carter and White reaching 1 DPM this season makes Zach more expendable?
Torrey Craig
This is a rough chart to see. According to DPM, Williams is already the better pick for the starting lineup. With the eye test, Craig is more of an active presence in the game. The reality is the starting lineup with Williams was bad and they have been terrible with Craig. Despite this, I like him but it also makes sense why he was a league minimum player.
Yeah Vuc’s graph looks ugly. There doesn’t appear to be too much noise in the data so you would expect this trend to continue. If we do decide to rebuild I think he will be very difficult to trade.
The Torrey Craig graph is terrifying