NBA Draft: Luka Doncic rises to first in 2018 NBA Redraft

Only Detroit Pistons fans and avid NBA followers were familiar with Bruce Brown Jr. over two seasons in the league, as he averaged just 6.3 points per game for the Pistons after they took him 42nd overall in the 2018 NBA Draft. Then they sent him to the Brooklyn nets for basically nothing and his career, and popularity, took off.

Brown is just 6’4″ tall but is a bulldog of a defender, with the strength and wingspan (6’9″) to take on larger players. He found his niche in the verdant shooting environment of the Nets, attacking the glass and cutting through space to impact the game without being able to shoot. And Brown very much cannot shoot, hitting just 29.8 percent from 3-point range in his career.

In another context, Brown would be less impactful, as most teams would need to put the ball in his hands to make up for his lack of shooting. He is a good playmaker, but he isn’t anything special, and he is much better deployed in an ecosystem where he can savvily navigate off-ball. The Nets, then, are one of the few places that can best optimize him.

Perhaps the Chicago Bulls are another, especially if we fast forward to the present day and their current construction with Nikola Vucevic playing center. They originally took Boise State wing Chandler Hutchinson, who has not panned out as an NBA rotation player. In Brown, the Bulls would certainly get one of those, a player who could replicate many of the things Kris Dunn did for them but with more size.