UCLA Basketball: Pundit Befuddled By Goals Of All-Star Bruin's Current Club

As well he should be.

Despite enjoying an incredibly lucrative NBA career and notching significant accolades (in the form of two All-Star appearances and counting), one-and-done UCLA Bruin Zach LaVine is stuck on a fairly rudderless Chicago Bulls team, playing alongside fellow Pac-12 alumni DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic.

Zach Buckley of Bleacher Report identifies Chicago as the most confounding team in the entire league. After making a variety of personnel changes around LaVine, team president Arturas Karnisovas has made almost no moves since 2021 to improve the obvious gaps on the roster.

As Buckley notes, the Bulls have gone just 86-78 during the two seasons their core "Mid Three" of LaVine, DeRozan and Vucevic has been together, and boasts exactly one playoff game win in that time frame. The team finished as the sixth seed in 2022 with after its other UCLA Bruins alum, Lonzo Ball, went down with a knee injury midway through the season. The Chino Hills native is out for the entirety of the 2023-24 season, too, and his entire pro career may now be in jeopardy. Last year, the 40-42 Bulls were the 10th seed, winning one play-in contest and losing a second to ultimately miss the playoffs.

The club made marginal improvements in free agency, by signing Jevon Carter from the Milwaukee Bucks and Torrey Craig from the Phoenix Suns, and otherwise brought back all of its major incumbent free agents. It seems doomed to finish somewhere in the 8-12 range in the Eastern Conference standings once again.