Complete Chicago Bulls Player Power Rankings After Season's First Month
The Chicago Bulls wrap up the first month of the season with a 9-4 record, the fourth-best mark in the NBA. What that says about the team is hard to say.
While they’re winning their games, they have an average margin of victory of just 1.4, which is only the eighth-best in the Eastern Conference. But that is a bit skewed.
The Bulls lost an overtime game by nine to the Minnesota Timberwolves, and they lost a game by 12 to the Golden State Warriors, which they were within three with less than two minutes remaining. And while the Bulls lost badly to Charlotte, they’ve also beaten Oklahoma City, Cleveland and Indiana.
They’ve been the league’s fifth-worst offense, according to NBA.com, but they’ve been the sixth-best defense as well, which is weird for a team that supposedly exchanged defense for offense.
In short, they’ve looked like exactly what they are: a deep and talented—yet flawed—team trying to learn a new system and growing in the process.
The players are ranked here with the bench first, and then the starters, though you could make a good argument that some of the reserves are playing better than the man in front of them. The standards are both objective and subjective and explained on the corresponding slides.
Bench Nos. 10-15
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12-14: Bobby Portis, Cameron Bairstow and Cristiano Felicio
There’s not much to say about the three bigs who rarely see the court. Bobby Portis, Cameron Bairstow and Cristiano Felicio have combined for 31 total minutes on the season, so there just isn’t much to analyze. Of the group, Portis, the rookie out of Arkansas whom the Bulls drafted with their first-round pick, has gotten 20 minutes and would get more if one of the four bigs ahead of him went down.
Bulls coach Fred Hoiberg told K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune about his discussion with Portis over his limited playing time: “He handled everything like a pro, and he's going to continue to work hard. He understands the situation. And he's learning from some great veterans. Joakim [Noah] has really taken him under his wing."
11. E’Twaun Moore
Moore had a chance to earn more minutes when Kirk Hinrich started off the season with a toe injury that forced him to miss seven of the first eight games. While there were a few good moments from “Pringles” as I like to call him (because you always want to "eat one more"), he wasn’t great.
He shot 42.9 percent from deep and typically played solid defense. But there were large gaps in the game where he'd disappear. Per Basketball-Reference.com, his player efficiency rating (PER) is just 9.4. He played under nine minutes against Portland, suggesting a tentative hold on a rotation spot at best.
10. Kirk Hinrich
Hinrich has been surprisingly effective since his return, having found some sort of Indian summer to his career. In fact, his shooting percentages (small sample size alert) are at career highs, according to Basketball-Reference.com: 54.8 field-goal percentage, 66.7 three-point percentage and 64.5 effective field-goal percentage. If he can maintain efficient shooting while continuing his dogged defense, the Bulls will prosper. The only reason he’s not higher in this ranking is the six missed games.
Bench Nos. 6-9
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9. Doug McDermott
When the Bulls brought over three-point-minded Fred Hoiberg to be the head coach, most expected a big beneficiary of the move would be Doug McDermott. They were not wrong. McDermott has already scored 14 more points than he did in his entire rookie season—and it's taken him 12 fewer shots. That has a lot to do with his red-hot shooting, which includes the second-best three-point percentage in the NBA (48.9).
His defense is still awful, though the effort is there. He has the 11th-best offensive plus-minus among small forwards, according to ESPN.com, but he has the 12th-worst defensive plus-minus. He’ll need to improve on that before he moves up in these rankings.
8. Taj Gibson
Taj Gibson has been getting his “Woo” back as the season progresses. He started off with his rhythm clearly being off, and that showed up especially at the defensive end. But of late, he’s been improving and is a big part of the reason for the Bulls success there. The Bulls' defensive rating is just 92.8 with Gibson on the court over the last six games.
7. Aaron Brooks
There’s a good argument to be made that right now Aaron Brooks is the best point guard on the team. Brooks is prospering in Hoiberg’s schemes. The zippy point guard's ability to both hit the three (36.4 percent) and get into the lane (83.3 percent on drives) benefit from the space Hoiberg’s offense provides. And that's helping him to a career-high 17.8 PER.
6. Joakim Noah
Joakim Noah is coming to life. Specifically, his rebounding has been ridiculous. Over the last five games he’s corralled 23.6 percent of all missed shots—third-best in the league over that span. Also, he is the only player in the league with both a total rebound percentage and assist percentage over 20 percent on the season.
His combination of defense, passing and rebounding made Noah an All-NBA center two years ago. And now it’s starting to come back, as his knee, which hindered him last year, seems to be better.
5. Tony Snell
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Tony Snell is a statistical enigma. In some way’s he’s magnificent. In other ways he’s awful.
On the positive side, if you’re just really strictly defining a three-and-D player as someone who defends and shoots threes, you can’t complain about Snell.
He’s shooting 40.5 percent from deep. When he’s defending shots, his opponents shoot just 34.9 percent, 7.9 percent below their normal average. What’s more, only 8-of-33 three-point attempts he’s defended this season have found their way into the hoop.
But some of those numbers are misleading.
Literally every single three he’s drained this year has been a catch-and-shoot shot, with zero dribbles and no defender within four feet—in other words, he’s only making the easiest shots there are to make. And he’s only shooting 23.7 percent from inside the arc, which is atrocious.
And part of his field-goal percentage against is disguised by a couple of things. First, that doesn’t tell you what happens on the shots he didn’t contend because he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Second, Jimmy Butler is typically guarding the better of the two wings.
That said, the Bulls’ defense is at its worse when he’s on the bench, so he deserves some credit, just not as much as the raw numbers suggest.
4. Nikola Mirotic
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Nikola Mirotic has been more “Neh-kola” than “three-Kola” of late. He was fantastic at the start of the season. The Bulls were plus-39 with him on the court in the first three games. They’ve only been plus-3 over the last 10. And in that span, Mirotic is shooting just 27.1 percent from three.
Complicating the matter is that when he’s not knocking down threes, no one cares about the pump fake that was so effective last year. And the refs are onto his gimmick, so he’s not getting the calls like he used to. He’s getting just 3.1 freebies per contest.
He’s had a couple of solid games in his last two outings, averaging 15.5 points, 9.0 rebounds and 4.0 assists, so it may be he’s working his way out of his slump.
Until he’s putting the stretch back into stretch 4, he’s stuck in these rankings at No. 4.
3. Derrick Rose
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You know that guy or girl whom you once had a very serious relationship with and thought you were in love with? And maybe you even were, but then you found she wasn’t the one. And for a long time it hurt whenever you thought about her?
That’s what I feel like every time I see Rose clank a three-point shot off the rim or decide it’s not worth the trouble of driving to the rim. Statistically, Rose has been pretty abysmal.
His 37.3 field-goal percentage is the second-worst in Bulls history among players who attempted at least 10 shots per game. His 17.4 three-point percentage is like something from a B-grade horror movie. Though, these numbers can be attributed to his double vision due to an orbital fractured suffered by a Gibson elbow on the first day of camp.
That said, the Bulls are not the disaster you might expect with Rose on the floor, and with Rose's play slightly improving as the season goes along, they're actually better. Over the last five, the Bulls have a net rating of plus-7.1 when he’s on the court, and that has a lot to do with what happens when he’s not shooting.
His teammates shoot 51.2 percent from two and 46.9 percent when he feeds them the ball. So while his shots aren’t going in, the defenses still pay enough attention to him that he’s able to create opportunities for those whose shots are.
2. Pau Gasol
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Pau Gasol remains in the starting lineup against the wishes of many Bulls fans, but, all things considered, he’s the second-best starter on the team right now. His numbers aren’t quite what they were last year, but he’s still giving the Bulls a solid 13.7 points, 10.0 boards and 1.9 blocks per night.
According to Seth Partnow’s rim protection numbers at Nylon Calculus, Gasol is “saving” 6.09 points per game at the rim, the 14th-best number in the league. That, to a degree, is offset by his slow-footedness that can make him vulnerable to the high pick-and-roll attack. Late to defend, he's often beaten.
That shows up in his “deterrence index,” which is 15th-lowest among centers with at least 15 minutes. Still, in the aggregate, he’s saved 10.63 points, which means he’s been a plus-defender on the season. This is also reflected in his 2.83 defensive real plus-minus, which is 11th among all centers.
That isn’t to tout Gasol as a game-changer or anything, but he’s been a consistent, mostly positive two-way force for the Bulls this season.
1. Jimmy Butler
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If there were still any questions about who the best player on the Bulls is, there shouldn’t be anymore. Jimmy Butler is a tier above anyone else on the team, including former MVP Rose.
In fact, it’s to the point where when you consider his two-way play this season, he’s arguably the best in the NBA at his position with James Harden and Klay Thompson struggling.
He's also entering the conversation for top-10 player.
Butler doesn’t put up huge box score numbers, but he puts up respectable all-around numbers consistently, and he plays both ends of the court. This season he’s averaging 21.1 points, 5.2 boards, 3.4 assists and 0.7 blocks per game, all while turning the ball over just 1.5 times per game.
The list of players who have posted all-around numbers like that consists of just Butler. That says something about him, and a lot of that is his ability to score and take care of the ball.
He’s 20th in PER, a stat heavily dependent on usage. But he is also 12th in win shares and win shares per 48 minutes, he’s eighth in box plus/minus, 11th in value over replacement player, ninth in real plus-minus and seventh in wins above replacement.
There’s a very real argument to be made that Butler is a top-10 player in the league, if not right on the edge of it.
All stats for this article were obtained from NBA.com or Basketball-Reference.com, unless otherwise specified.
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