NBA Mock Draft: Bulls projected pick is exactly why they needed a Nikola Vucevic trade

The Chicago Bulls put together one of the more baffling trade deadlines in recent memory.

After trying to offload Zach LaVine's contract for months, they finally did it. LaVine was sent to Sacramento in exchange for Kevin Huerter, Zach Collins, and Tre Jones. The only problem? That salary dump occurred during the middle of LaVine's best individual season to date. He was rendering All-Star impact for a team in the Eastern Conference Play-In race. To get practically nothing of long-term value in return was underwhelming, to say the least.

There was small comfort, however, in the fact that Chicago was finally picking a direction. Arturas Karnisovas was finally moving the Bulls toward a full-bore rebuild, as evidenced by the Bulls' reacquisition their own first-round pick, top-10 protections removed. The next moves were simple — trade Nikola Vucevic, trade Lonzo Ball, maybe even trade Coby White, and hit the reset button.

None of those subsequent moves materialized, however. The Bulls held onto Vucevic, signed Ball to a contract extension, and basically kept the whole team together, minus LaVine. At his post-deadline press conference, Karnisovas said Chicago was still gunning for the Play-In, and that the Bulls wanted to remain competitive.

That is a remarkably dumb strategy. Rather than bottoming out or leveling up, Chicago is treading water with no apparent end goal. The 2025 NBA Draft might give the Bulls some semblance of long-term direction, but FanSided's latest mock draft only drives home the disappointment of another quiet Bulls trade deadline.

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Bulls target Duke's Khaman Maluach in 2025 NBA mock draft

Chicago vaulted up to No. 4 in our simulated lottery to select Duke freshman Khaman Maluach, the standout 7-foot-2 center.

It's a great pick for the Bulls, a team that should be swinging for the fences on draft night, "fit" be damned. Chicago needs more size and a better defensive backbone. Maluach can provide it, offering a significant rim deterrent in the middle of the paint. He moves incredibly well in space for his size and averages 1.1 blocks in just 20.3 minutes per game for Duke. For an 18-year-old with limited basketball experience relative to his peers, Maluach's instincts and discipline on defense are mighty impressive.

This pick just begs the question, though... why is Vucevic still on the Bulls' roster? Even if Chicago trades him in the offseason, it will be for less value than they could've received at the deadline. Vucevic is 34 years old in the middle of a remarkable bounce-back season — what feels like his final flourish as a "star" in today's NBA. The Bulls could've exchanged an aging center at the tail end of his career for legitimate assets. Instead, there's a good chance Vucevic stands in the way of their 2025 lottery pick.

By the way, a top-10 pick would've conveyed to Chicago, even without their pick coming back in the LaVine trade. It belonged to Sacramento, top-10 protected. If the Bulls get lucky with the pingpong balls, or lose games anyway, then the LaVine trade really was a bust. A haul of three bench pieces for your 24-PPG scorer with elite shooting efficiency is incredible asset mismanagement.

This general logic applies to the roster at large and almost any pick, too. None of Chicago's current pieces feel like long-term building blocks. Take a point guard like Dylan Harper, for example, and you can question why Lonzo, White, and others are still mucking up the depth chart. Take a 3-and-D wing, such as Liam McNeeley, and it becomes a question of 'why is Patrick Williams still here?'

Chicago was given a prime opportunity to tear this roster down to the studs and begin its rebuild in earnest. That can still happen in the offseason, but why should we trust this Bulls front office to make sensible decisions at any point? Karnisovas and Marc Eversley have not earned such faith, and Jerry Reinsdorf teams have a troubling history of committing steadfast to mediocrity.

Maluach is the transformative talent this Bulls organization needs, but good luck trusting the front office to handle his development wisely or to put him in an optimal position to succeed.