Bulls want to re-sign DeMar DeRozan and time is a flat circle

Over the past two seasons, the Chicago Bulls have paid DeMar DeRozan, Nikola Vucevic and Zach LaVine roughly $130 million as the core of a team that has finished with an 86-78 record and just a single playoff win. To be fair, Lonzo Ball was supposed to be the fourth wheel for this bus and the knee injury that has held him to just 35 games over those two seasons (and which will keep him out all of this coming season) has sent them careening off course.

Still the Bulls, apparently like this core enough on paper that they're willing to try and keep it together to see if it can produce different results. After flirting with trading Zach LaVine, Chicago ultimately kept him and then re-signed the 32-year-old Vucevic to a three-year, $60 million extension this offseason. DeRozan will be a free agent at the end of this season but Bulls GM Marc Eversley has already implied that they'd like to re-sign him as well, telling The Athletic's Darnell Mayberry:

“I would love DeMar to be part of this program long term. Let’s see how that plays out and what that looks like going forward,”he said.“When those conversations take place, we’ll speak about that more when that happens. But we hope Deebo’s back. He’s been an integral part of this program’s success. We hope he is here long term.”

Why would the Bulls want to re-sign DeMar DeRozan?

Besides naive optimism, I'm not sure there really is a reason to re-sign DeRozan. He'd be 35 by the time an extension kicked on and potentially 39 by the time a max extension finished. While DeRozan has been effective in a Bulls' uniform — averaging 26.2 points, 5.0 assists and 4.6 rebounds per game — the team still has a negative point differential in the nearly 3,000 minutes DeRozan, Vucevic and LaVine have been on the floor together.

Even if the Bulls can get DeRozan to re-sign at a more reasonable price and on a shorter deal they're still locking themselves in even further to a core that hasn't been anywhere near good enough to justify the cost. There's no real reason to think that the Bulls are a lucky break or two from being a competitor over the next two or three years.

That being said, if they're not also going to trade LaVine and be paying Vucevic for the next three years there's an argument they need to re-sign DeRozan. They're not going to get better or more productive value for that money in the short-term. If they're going to pay through the nose for a 35-win team, might as well pay a little bit more to try and stay (slightly) on the right side of 0.500.

As long as they're going to eschew a rebuild, the Bulls might as well dance with the flawed veterans they already have.