Explosive offense for Chicago Bulls in opening-night loss; 3 takeaways

3. The Chicago Bulls aren’t reliant on just Zach LaVine

The Chicago Bulls scored 125 points in their season opener and last season’s leading scorer, Zach LaVine had an off night. That’s a nice anecdote, even if the loss was bad. It wasn’t just Lauri Markkanen‘s 35 points that was impressive either.

It’s refreshing to see this squad actually NOT struggle to score, with so many options available for head coach Jim Boylen to play with, though they didn’t post strong numbers from long range, hitting on only 9-of-30 3-point attempts.

https://twitter.com/chicagobulls/status/1187154004939288576?s=20

Newcomers Thaddeus Young and Coby White pumped in 17 points each and LaVine added 16. Altogether, the Bulls had six players in double figures and a seventh, Otto Porter, finished with nine points. In all, the only Bulls player receiving minutes failing to score was Luke Kornet, who played seven minutes.

That said, no player played more than 35 minutes and nine received at least 10 minutes of playing time against the Hornets.

Simply put, Boylen shouldn’t have to rely on piecing together minutes from unproven players like Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot or Wayne Selden this season.

Denzel Valentine didn’t see any minutes off the bench coming off of reconstructive ankle surgery, though it would be expected he’d crack the rotation at some point, and second-year swingman Chandler Hutchison remains out with hamstring issues.

Fans might not like to hear this, especially after a brutal loss on the road to a bad team, but the front office duo of John Paxson and Gar Forman have assembled a nice roster.