We’d all been waiting for it … that one moment when a free agent deal comes through that just leaves us absolutely slack-jawed.
Usually the strongest bursts of irrational exuberance come right out of the gate, but not this year. Even with a historic tsunami of contract agreements in the opening hours of free agency, none bowled us over as a truly stupendous overpay.
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That is until the Bulls made a deal for DeMar DeRozan. This was the moment we’d been waiting for, and while we were staring expectantly at the Knicks and Kangz to entertain us, it instead was the Bulls who came out of left field and surprised us.
The agreement on Tuesday will pay DeRozan the fairly staggering sum of $85 million over three years, and cost the Bulls a first-round pick and two second-round picks, and surrendering big man Thaddeus Young. Al-Farouq Aminu’s fungible $10 million contract also goes to San Antonio as part of the deal.
Let’s break it down:
What is DeRozan worth?
DeRozan can certainly score, and he passes well enough to operate as a de facto point guard at times, but he turns 32 this week, doesn’t shoot 3s and is a subpar defender.
BORD$ valued him at $16.2 million for this year, with that figure obviously declining in the out years as he gets further into his 30s. Even a rosy outlook would have his value over a three-year deal topping out at about $40 million. There’s a chance this could be one of the worst value contracts in the league by 2023-24. (Trust me, I know a thing or two about having the worst contract in the league.)
The other side of this is his value specific to the Bulls, which admittedly is a bit higher. DeRozan is better as a floor-raiser than a ceiling-lifter; he isn’t massively efficient and it’s tough to play him off the ball, but his buckets can keep a bad offense afloat. Chicago, surely, is a team closer to the floor than the ceiling, ranking 19th in Offensive Efficiency last year. Oddly, the turnover on Chicago’s roster may leave defense as its bigger concern, with DeRozan, Nikola Vučević and Zach LaVine now the three pillars of the franchise.
Overall, it appears Chicago paid DeRozan roughly twice his projected value over the next three years.
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Who were they bidding against?
Of all the angles in this trade, the one that is by far the most bewildering is that the Bulls felt they had to step up to the amazing sum of $28 million a year for DeRozan. Finding anybody who had anywhere near the wherewithal, let alone the desire, to get to this price is quite a challenge.
Consider this: If they had paid half as much — $14 million a year — who was outbidding them? The Clippers and Lakers only had the taxpayer midlevel exception. The Knicks quickly burned through their cap space to lock in the six seed for the next three years. The only teams with the space to make a move here were Oklahoma City, which isn’t rebuilding around a 32-year-old, and DeRozan’s own team in San Antonio, which didn’t seem to be in that big a rush to bring him back.
Even if the Knicks had stepped up to make their four-year, $78 million Evan Fournier offer (with a fourth-year team option) to DeRozan instead — something we have no indication they were willing to do, but humor me here — matching that would have left the Bulls in a better place. They’d have about $10 million more in salary wiggle room each of the next three seasons.
What’s more likely is that they were bidding against a Miami team that could sign-and-trade him into a salary slot worth roughly $12 million at the absolute most (the Heat would exceed the luxury tax apron with any more than that, given the deals already in line for Kyle Lowry and Duncan Robinson), a Clippers team with the $5.9 million taxpayer midlevel, and a lot of vapor.
Of course, this entire line of discourse assumes they had to have DeRozan. They didn’t, of course; there were plenty of alternatives in the marketplace, some of whom might have come considerably cheaper or with fewer fit issues.
Is DeRozan more valuable than Young?
OK, he is. But how much more valuable? At 34, one could factor in some likely decline this season for Young, but he still projected to deliver $9.3 million of value on his $14.2 million contract this season.
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And again, on this particular Bulls team, one can argue Young had more value than that. While Vučević’s arrival in the middle of last season cut into some of Young’s utility as a fourth quarter small-ball 5, the Bulls’ bigs are all bad on defense except Young, who is a plus at either 4 or 5.
His departure begs the question of how Chicago could potentially fill this role; the Bulls possibly used their midlevel exception on Alex Caruso and went over the cap, but still have some outs left with Lauri Markkanen’s Bird rights and a likely $4.1 million trade exception coming from a Daniel Theis sign-and-trade. (While we’re here: If Young was on the move, what was wrong with keeping Theis? They had full Bird rights on him.)
What about the picks?
Chicago has pushed its chips in further into an “all-in” approach, an odd take for a team that went 31-41 and 26-39 the past two seasons, but here we are. The Bulls sent a moderately protected first-round pick to San Antonio (I’m told the protections are top-10 in the first year, top-8 in the second and third years; the pick can convey as early as 2025 or as late as 2028), along with two second-round picks, which is another stupendous part of this deal: Chicago surrendered significant draft capital for the right to grossly overpay a mid-tier player in his mid-30s.
This is significant in two ways. First, the Bulls already owe a first-round pick to Orlando from the Vučević trade (this deal also cost them the 8th pick in the 2021 draft, so they’ve paid a hefty price already).
I can make the roundabout case that signing DeRozan likely softens the damage from the pick owed in 2023, not because having him on this deal is boon for 2022-23, but because anything the Bulls accomplish this year increases their chances of retaining LaVine in free agency after the season. That likely contributed to Chicago’s desperation to get something done here.
The Bulls also capped the worst-case scenario by protecting the pick; San Antonio isn’t getting into the top eight. That said, I’m trying to figure out how this negotiation looked from the Spurs’ end. Were they really gonna turn down the deal if Chicago didn’t throw in two seconds? San Antonio already had a nearly full roster and more cap space than it could use; the Spurs turned it into a first and two seconds, and could get paid on the back end too if they move Young at the trade deadline. Somewhere, Sam Presti nods and smiles. (Side note: do you realize the Spurs are getting better draft assets from trading DeRozan after his contract expired than they did from trading Kawhi Leonard?)
Finally, there is a huge opportunity cost to this trade as well: Chicago can’t trade any more first-round picks. This is it. The so-called Stepien Rule blocks teams from owing future picks in consecutive years, meaning that the Bulls’ only opportunity to trade a pick in the next half-decade will come on draft night in 2022 and 2024.
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So, that’s kinda it. They’ve used their chips and they’re all in. Is Vučević-LaVine-Ball-DeRozan the crew you want to push in the entire chip stack over?
How much did Chicago improve this year?
Bulls’ fans can rejoice over one small thing: In the short term, Chicago will almost certainly be better as a result of this deal. A Bulls teams that has been quite bad for the last half-decade has a reasonable chance at a Wizardy renaissance as the 8th seed in the East. If that’s the type of thing that gets your blood pumping, legggggoooooooo.
That’s not just because of DeRozan, of course. The trade for Lonzo Ball was legitimately good, sending out a second-rounder to turn Tomáš Satoranský into a better shooter who is six years younger. Ball’s money is less outrageous as well, with his four-year, $85 million deal coming pretty close to where most models valued him.
Caruso’s contract also rates as a likely break-even or better proposition, and between them Ball and Caruso will add some size, defense and playmaking to the backcourt. And the Bulls might not be done, with $14 million left in room below the tax line. They could either re-sign Markkanen, sign-and-trade him, or engage in other shenanigans with the Theis trade exception. They could even do a double sign-and-trade with Theis, since the move to Houston isn’t done yet, and slot in a salary for up to $7.2 million there.
Nonetheless, looking at the East landscape, Chicago’s path to anything above averageness still looks quite daunting, and they’ve burned through all the assets that could potentially point them to a better place. Milwaukee, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston and Miami pretty clearly stand above them in the Eastern hierarchy, while New York, Indiana (side note: Y’all are sleeping on Indy), Charlotte, Toronto and those wacky Wizards all will be pushing them in the next tier down. It’s possible they could have a halfway decent year and still finish 11th and not even make the play-in tournament.
How much will DeRozan’s contract hurt in the following two years?
The real pain of DeRozan’s deal is likely to come in 2022-23 and 2023-24, when his play is expected to decline while a max deal for LaVine soaks up a far greater chunk of Chicago’s cap. In 2022-23 in particular, a max contract for LaVine would leave the Bulls with little room below the luxury tax line to add any other players, and likely little trade flexibility as well. The situation improves in 2023-24 because Vučević comes off the books … but the Bulls would need to re-sign or replace him at that point. (They also might need to replace DeRozan by then, but I digress…)
Meanwhile, the lack of draft picks means few young Bulls will be rising up to fill salary spots on the cheap. Chicago only had the 39th pick this season and is down four future second-round picks. As noted above, the Bulls have also burned through the first-round pick capital they could use to upgrade the roster as other needs arise.
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Summing it up
Overall, this move floored me because it came across as a classic ‘win the press conference’ trade … the type where you wonder if the owner took away the front office’s keys and tried driving himself for a while. (I must emphasize that I have no inside info here, I’m just telling you how it looks.)
Yes, the Bulls made themselves marginally better this year … at an eye-popping cost both financially and in terms of draft capital. They gave up a player and draft capital to pay a player roughly twice what he’s worth over the next three seasons. In doing so, Chicago set itself up to chase a .500 record and a low-end playoff berth this year … and likely kneecapped its ability to do anything beyond that for the next half decade or so.
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(Top photo of DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)
