I have not pivoted towards ‘well this season is trash so let’s become draft nerds’ just yet, mostly because it’s merely friggin’ August. But, man: the Bulls really will be bad and totally ignored by the NBA fanbase.

So bad, in fact, that in the latest ESPN mock draft (I believe their first with new acquisition DraftExpress under their banner), the Bulls get the #1 pick. They used the ‘The ESPN Summer Forecast’ to project this. That assumed that Nikola Mirotic is simply vanished (I’m waiting on giving too much to projections until we get closer to the season and rosters are more set), but even so it ultimately projects that the Bulls will be ‘fighting’ for a top pick.

They have the Bulls taking Michael Porter, a freshman-to-be out of Missouri.

That’d be exciting!

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It’s, still and forever, pathetic that:

1. the Bulls have botched their team to the point where they felt they ‘had’ to rebuild

2. botched the first step of THE PATH in taking back a bad trade package with no future picks, and winding up with fewer picks than what they started, to now their own pick is their best ‘asset’ meaning it’s good to be bad.

]

The good news is that this looks to be a loaded, top-heavy, class. Our own favorite draft nerd, Ricky, says so, with the class being buoyed further by previously-assumed 2019 draftee Marvin Bagley reclassifying to come out a year earlier.

NBA fans just spent the last six months hearing about how great the 2017 draft class was. Is it possible the 2018 class can be even stronger? With the addition of Bagley, it certainly looks that way. There now appears to be four legitimate options for the No. 1 pick, as well as two productive college sophomores and a pair of enticing freshman bigs that fall just below the top tier.

Ricky rates Slovenian Luka Doncic the best prospect in the draft.

We’ll still have to see if that stays true throughout the season (there’s a whole season before we get to start progress of the rebuild! ughhhhhhhh), but maybe the Bulls will be in a position to where they can’t screw up. That’s the John Paxson ‘method’ of ‘success’.