How the Chicago Bulls rank in the league by stat category

While the Chicago Bulls’ 2018-19 season has been marked by injury so far, even when healthy there are some issues with this roster.

With the slew of early season injuries, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Chicago Bulls have started out of the gate anywhere from mediocre to downright bad, relying on unlikely reserves like Ryan Arcadiacono (26.1 minutes per game) and rookie Chandler Hutchison (19 minutes per game), as well as a guy who was purposely benched as a part of last year’s tank campaign, Justin Holiday (35.6 minutes per game).

While the only worse teams than the Bulls currently are the Atlanta Hawks, Phoenix Suns and Cleveland Cavaliers, few teams ranking low in the standings have both a well-established front office and the players rostered to be a playoff team in the future.

Nonetheless, looking at some of the weakest team-by-team stat categories for the current Chicago Bulls, well, it ain’t pretty.

The Bulls currently score the fifth-fewest points per game (104.3) in the NBA. They have three flat out offensive players Fred Hoiberg is playing heavy minutes in Justin Holiday, Zach LaVine and Jabari Parker. They’ll get some help when Lauri Markkanen and Bobby Portis return, but the logjam at the power forward position is clear as day. There are three score-first power forwards on the team. The Jabari Parker-small forward experiment failed miserably. Something has to give.

Ironically, with all of these scoring power forwards (two are currently injured), the Bulls also rank as the second-worst team on the offensive boards (7.8 per game). This means they are missing key opportunities to get a new shot clock and reset the offense. No grit means no glory. This team needs to be hungrier, especially in obvious places like offensive opportunities.

While Zach LaVine has been playing his role as the acrobatic marquee scorer the Bulls had hoped for (averaging a career-best 25.9 points per game), his efforts during this injury-plagued season haven’t bailed out the team’s overall inefficiency with the ball. In fact, the Chicago Bulls currently rank as 27th in plus/minus rating at -7.9.

They aren’t sharing the ball well without Kris Dunn in the lineup, ranking 24th in assists at 21.7 per game. They aren’t rebounding the ball well despite the impressive start for rookie Wendell Carter Jr., ranking 24th in rebounds at 42.4 per game.

The bottom line here is that even when healthy, this roster still has some glaring problems. Who will be the odd man out in the power forward logjam? How will Denzel Valentine, a defensive player, help the rotation when there is clearly an offensive deficiency?

But the most important ranking to look at right now is the win column, in which the Bulls rank 27th in the NBA. While that may seem pretty tough to digest, that also means better chances at landing one of the unbelievable forwards that are currently rostered by the Duke Blue Devils. Guys like Cameron Reddish or R.J. Barrett would plug into the starting lineup neatly.

The picture will be clearer when Dunn, Markkanen and Portis return, but until then, the losses certainly don’t hurt the Bulls’ NBA Drafty Lottery chances.