NBA Offseason 2020: 5 potential landing spots for Russell Westbrook

4. Chicago Bulls

The Chicago Bulls‘ No. 4 pick in this year’s draft is out of the question, but if new head coach Billy Donovan is uneasy about rolling with Tomas Satoransky or handing the reins over to a second-year bench firecracker like Coby White, a Westbrook reunion might make some sense.

Otto Porter Jr.’s $28.5 million player option is the starting point, and for salary-matching purposes, the expiring deals of Cristiano Felicio ($7.5 million) and Luke Kornet ($2.3 million) would provide Houston with some cap relief in 2021. Then it becomes a matter of whether Houston could talk Chicago into including draft compensation of some sort.

We don’t know much about Arturas Karnisovas yet, but that doesn’t seem within his M.O. as he readies this franchise for a full-scale rebuild. In fact, a Westbrook trade doesn’t seem to fit with Chicago’s youth movement, but if all they’d be giving up is the expiring deal of a young wing Karnisovas never added himself, maybe this becomes a tad more realistic?

Westbrook would automatically make the Bulls more exciting, even if he and Zach LaVine in the same backcourt would be catastrophic on the defensive end. Then again, if Karnisovas continues to tweak, LaVine probably won’t last long into this rebuild anyway.

For the Rockets, they’d get a one-year trial for Porter, who’s only 27 and put up 17.5 points and 5.5 rebounds per game on a scorching 48.8 percent shooting from long range over his first 15 games with Chicago until he got hurt. Injuries derailed his 2019-20 campaign and limited him to just 14 games, but his potential as a younger 3-and-D wing would be a nice complement to Harden if he can return fully healthy.