Bulls: Does Kris Dunn’s defense make up for his poor offense?

Depending on the metric, Chicago Bulls’ guard Kris Dunn’s defense falls somewhere between good and elite. But is he good enough to negate his offensive shortcomings?

With the NBA projected to set up a campus in Chicago for the eight teams that didn’t qualify for the Orlando bubble to practice and play games at, Chicago Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas may have a chance to evaluate this young core he apparently has no plans of breaking up.

If this Chicago “second bubble” plan happens, one player Karnisovas won’t likely have a chance to gauge is point guard Kris Dunn. Thanks to a knee injury, the fourth-year player was set to miss the rest of the 2019-20 season, and even if the team gets a chance to play more games, the restricted free agent still might opt out of the experience even if he’s healthy enough to play.

If that happens, the team will only have his four-season sample size to determine whether the former fifth overall pick fits into its long-term vision, especially now that he’s eligible for a more lucrative qualifying offer due to the coronavirus-shortened traditional regular season.

You can make plenty of arguments for keeping Dunn in Chicago, and most of them center around his defense, given that most metrics at least rate him as a good defender — he ranks second among point guards in Defensive Real Plus/Minus, fifth among qualified players in Player Impact Plus/Minus, second in Defensive Box Plus/Minus, and seventh in Defensive RAPTOR. Dunn shined in the on/off department, too; the Bulls allowed 6.2 fewer points per 100 possessions when he was on the floor.

Dunn owes a lot of his success on defense to his 6’9″ wingspan. Those long arms have made contesting shots, as he does in these two possessions against DeMar DeRozan, much easier (note his excellent hedge and recover in the second video):

His spindly reach also allows him to poke the ball away from unsuspecting guards and veer into passing lanes:

And Dunn’s lateral quickness and athleticism generally keep opposing ball-handlers from blowing past him:

Of course, Dunn has his flaws on defense — while he flourished in pick-and-roll (0.71 opponent’s points per possession [PPP]; 89th percentile) and isolation situations (0.67 opponent’s PPP; 89th percentile), his results against spot-up shooters (0.99 opponent’s PPP; 53rd percentile), on off-ball screens (1.09 opponent’s PPP; 27th percentile), and in post-ups (1.12 opponent’s PPP; 22nd percentile) haven’t looked as good — but no one will argue against his value on that end.

It’s the other end of the floor, however, that should concern the Chicago Bulls. They had three seasons to figure out whether Dunn’s offense could match his defense and, thus far, he has looked like the same player who made himself expendable with the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Dunn is a decent enough playmaker, as seen on this alley-oop to Daniel Gafford, but his inability to stretch the defense with his shooting often offsets whatever benefits that come out of his passing. This season, he shot an awful 25 percent from 3-point range, way below league average. If not for his efforts in the paint and inside the restricted area — where he finished around the mean — his true shooting and effective field goal percentages, which already aren’t that good, would look a lot worse.

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That negative shooting value is the main contributor to his equally unsightly offensive plus/minus metrics (-3.7 OBPM, -1.14 ORPM, -1.53 OPIPM, -1.7 Offensive RAPTOR), which brings us back to the main thesis: Do these blights overshadow his plus-defense?

The answer to that depends on your preferred metric, but, for the most part, it seemingly doesn’t. In terms of this year, RAPTOR (2.5), PIPM (1.4), and RPM (0.92) all view Dunn as an overall positive on the court. Even BPM, which is the least bullish on Dunn, but even that stat pegs him as slightly below average (-0.6).

But given that this was Dunn’s best season as a defender by all accounts (he’s never topped 1.8 DBPM prior to 2019-20; his DPIPM never topped 1.1 in that same span), it seems foolhardy to expect him to continue to defend at a level that wipes away his errant jumpers (to be fair, Dunn ranked in the 78th percentile this year in Regularized Adjusted Deterrence, which tracks the quality of shots a player allows, but he never cracked the 24th in the previous three seasons).

Maybe he does, but defensive numbers — except for PIPM — tend to fluctuate based on 3-point luck, so there’s a non-zero chance Dunn regresses a bit, and unless he becomes a better shooter overnight, he won’t make up the difference on offense.

That’s the debate Karnisovas and the rest of the Bulls front office will have this offseason as it pertains to Dunn. Even though the restricted free agent designation basically gives them the right of first refusal, the barren wasteland that is the 2020 free-agent class guarantees at least one team will give Dunn a look for his defensive prowess.

But the team that ultimately signs him, be it the Chicago Bulls or someone else, may have to live with the bad outweighing the good.