The 30-game tryout started on Saturday.
While most of the roster should be on notice that wearing a Bulls jersey is not promised beyond mid-April at this point, newly acquired Kevin Huerter, Tre Jones and Zach Collins are really operating on a shorter clock.
The goal over the final two-plus months is to try and see how they fit moving forward, both on the court and in the locker room. No easy task when playing time won’t be the easiest to come by.
Jones is a free agent this summer, so his future has the most uncertainty, but Huerter and Collins are both signed through the 2025-26 season. That doesn’t mean they can’t be traded this summer, but they might also be keepers.
“Yeah, I think that’s very fair,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said, agreeing that it is almost a tryout. “These guys fitting in stylistically on how we want to play, you want to give them a chance and see how they can help our group more or less. For those guys, and we had discussed this and it’s this way around the league, there’s always these pins and needles, ‘Am I going to be here? I just got here. Am I going somewhere else?’ Now that things are settled, I think they would like to come in here and be able to help.”
The difficulty will be figuring out how they help since coming over last Sunday in a three-team trade for Zach Collins.
Huerter and Jones made their Bulls debut in the first quarter against the Warriors, coming off the bench. With Lonzo Ball out because of sickness it did make it easier to get them in, even with all the guards the roster is carrying.
Collins will admittedly be a little tougher for Donovan to find consistent playing time for initially, especially with only one official practice for the group.
The Bulls have seldom played lineups with two bigs, so there’s more that has to be ironed out there.
Collins, however, was hoping to get some playing time alongside center Nikola Vucevic.
“We both have similar games in which we can both finish in the mid-range, at the rim or shoot threes, so I think there’s a tandem there that can work,” Collins said. “And on top of that (Vucevic is) a very smart player, so he’ll make my job easier when we’re out there together.”
Ball-ing out
There’s a method behind the Ball contract extension, and a lot of it has to do with the Bulls still looking to go young but having a high-IQ mentor on and off the court.
“Away from the court he’s been tremendous with the group and tremendous to work with,” Donovan said of Ball. “We obviously have a lot of young guys and he’s a real high-IQ guy and I really encouraged him that he’s got to share just his experience and his knowledge because he can help our guys.”
Donovan said Ball has really matured in that department and has done a much better job of using his voice this season, even when he’s not playing.
“A lot of these young guys they just don’t know,” Donovan added. “There’s a newness in all of this for them. And for someone like him, who has such a high-IQ, in a lot of ways he’s kind of a stabilizing force.”
For starters
Donovan doesn’t like showing his hand with starting lineups, but at least for now it looks like rookie Matas Buzelis could be sticking around as a starter.
The forward started his second consecutive game and has now scored in double-digits in six straight games.