Bulls<\/a> guard Josh Giddey?<\/p>\nGet back to him in a few months after this roster has possibly been punched in the face and gone through adversity.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that Giddey is a cup-half-empty guy, but he is a realist. And the reality of the situation is he\u2019s entering his third season with the franchise, has gone through a front office purge, a coaching change, and has seen enough player movement where name tags should be made available.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery team coming out of training camp probably thinks they\u2019re going to surprise people,\u201d Giddey said now that the preseason has ended. \u201cEvery team probably says the same thing, that they\u2019re ready for a big year, but you never really know until the season starts.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m very confident with the guys we have, but until you go through adversity, until you go through a losing streak, that\u2019s when you find out where you are as a team. I don\u2019t want to say we\u2019re going to be a playoff team or whatever, but I think we\u2019re good enough to be competitive every night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Las Vegas says otherwise, putting the win-share for the Bulls at 29.5. Understandable, but also a number that hasn\u2019t gone unnoticed.<\/p>\n
\u201cVegas does their job putting win shares out there, but it\u2019s our job to go out there and try and win all 82 games,\u201d Giddey said. \u201cWe\u2019ll see where we end up after all 82 games.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s the thing about this season for the Bulls: They could end up with 29 wins but if rookie Caleb Wilson and third-year forward Matas Buzelis take major steps towards resembling foundation pieces for the franchise moving forward, it could very much feel like a successful campaign.<\/p>\n
Just don\u2019t try convincing Wilson that under 30 wins is an acceptable outcome.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, nobody really cares on this team what Vegas says,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cWe know that winning is a process, we know what it takes to win, so we just got to go out and do it. Of course we have that chip on our shoulder being underrated, especially in a stacked East (Eastern Conference), but we\u2019re just going to take it day by day.\u201d<\/p>\n
A mindset Wilson has been practicing since training camp started. With five preseason games under his belt, the No. 4 overall pick finished averaging 15.8 points, 4.6 rebounds, and 2.8 assists with three blocks. He shot 43.5% from the field and 31% from three-point range but will start the regular season insisting that the game has already slowed down for him while his confidence hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I\u2019m able to read defenses much better,\u201d Wilson said of his improvement. \u201cOffensively, I feel like I\u2019ve gotten much better off ball. I\u2019ve just grown in a lot of areas just through trial and error.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to competing, honestly. That\u2019s all I really want to do. When the games actually matter, and everything matters, you get the best out of everybody. I\u2019m excited for that aspect of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
As far as new coach Tiago Splitter\u2019s excitement level? Is any NBA coach ever really truly happy with the amount of work done in the preseason?<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of the coaches on all 30 teams, they always think they gotta do more (in the preseason),\u201d Splitter said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a checklist of things you want to implement, but it\u2019s almost impossible. There are things that we\u2019re going to implement throughout the season, defensively, offensively, also like game situations depending on who you are playing against, defensive schemes, so yeah, we\u2019re not there yet, 100% we\u2019re not there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is the time of the NBA season where almost every player and coach admittedly is filled with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3771],"tags":[7,920,919,329,3824,6],"class_list":["post-862528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago-bulls","tag-basketball","tag-bulls","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-bulls","tag-chicagobulls","tag-nba"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/117465911379312333","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}