3 Chicago Bulls players who won’t be back next season

1. Denzel Valentine

The Bulls retained Valentine as a restricted free agent last offseason, as the new front office surely wanted to see if he was a potential piece of the future. But other than a game here and there, and a six-game double-figure scoring streak in February, he was again not a difference maker this past season.

A trend during Valentine’s career, as cited by Andrew Miller over at Pippen Ain’t Easy, is his playing time trending down late in seasons. It happened again this year under a new coach in Donovan, though there may have been some reasons for that.

After the game in the clip above, Valentine played in nine of the Bulls final 12 games and he may as well not have played in three of those (less than two minutes in each). There were no indications he was injured, he was just all but out of the rotation before totaling 36 minutes in two meaningless games to end the season.

Valentine’s market as an unrestricted free agent this summer won’t be great. But he clearly needs a change of scenery. The 14th overall pick in the 2016 draft out of Michigan State, the Bulls will easily move on from another mistake made by Forman and Paxson.