No matter how many early wins the Bulls bank, there will always be some sense of pervading doubt on how good this team really is after what occurred last year.

Last season the Bulls compiled an impressive 22-12 record and sat in second place in the Eastern Conference on Jan. 7. They bottomed out at 20-28 the rest of the way and shockingly missed the playoffs.

A lot of people knew that the Bulls were a mirage last year. There were signs buried in the statistics that those 2015-16 Bulls were having extraordinarily good luck.

But is the same true for this team? The Bulls now sit at 8-4, outpacing every preseason expectation.

Let’s take a look at how we knew the Bulls were a fluke last year and whether that same reasoning applies to this team.

Net Rating

Net rating is a much better indicator than winning percentage early on in determining how well a team plays. It is a measure of the average point differential scaled per 100 possessions.

Last year’s Bulls had a net rating of +2.3 at that Jan. 7 high point. That net rating corresponds to a 47- to 48-win team. That’s significantly lower than the 56-win pace the team was on based on winning percentage.

The mediocre net rating was the biggest indicator of the Bulls’ luck, and that prediction ended up coming to fruition.

This year’s team has a much stronger net rating at +5.6. That corresponds to a 56-win team behind some crude calculations. Only four teams (Spurs, Warriors, Thunder, Cavs) finished with a higher net rating last year.

The 2017 Bulls’ net rating is a strong sign that this team is more legitimate than last year’s squad. It’s a truly impressive mark and gives more credibility to their 8-4 record.

Opponent 3-point percentage

Seth Partnow, formerly of Nylon Calculus and now of the Milwaukee Bucks, researched 3-point volatility last year and showed that 3-point percentage is highly random. If a team has been particularly “good” at getting opponents to shoot a low percentage on those shots, it’s probably just luck and they will regress back to league average as the season progresses.

Through Jan. 7, the 2015-16 Bulls were inordinately lucky in their 3-point defense. Opponents shot 32.9 percent, well below the 35.4 percent league average mark last year. Their free throw “defense” was extremely lucky as well – opponents shot the worst free throw percentage in the league against them. Obviously, there is nothing the Bulls were doing to guard free throws and that number was going to trend back to league average at some point.

Indeed, both numbers came back to earth as the year progressed — opponents shot roughly four percentage points higher on free throws and 3-pointers after that Jan. 7 high water mark.

Let’s look at this year’s squad now.



Opponents are still shooting worse than league-average, but it’s not nearly as severe of a disparity as last season.

This is a decent indicator that the Bulls’ defense will regress in this regard, but they probably won’t experience the free-fall levels that happened last year. Again, these are shooting percentages that the Bulls can’t really control, so they’ve been a bit lucky so far.

Unsustainable shooting performances

When players or teams open the season with ridiculous shooting percentages (good or bad), it’s common sense to know that those things aren’t going to last.

We’re already seeing this with Dywane Wade, who shot 53 percent on 3-pointers through his first five games. He’s 2-of-17 since that hot start and has regressed to 33 percent, which more closely resembles his career 28 percent mark.

The 2015-16 Bulls didn’t have any crazy shooting performances like Wade from their big-volume guys, but this year the Bulls’ shooting percentages are all over the place. Jimmy Butler isn’t going to continue to shoot 45 percent on 3-pointers and Bobby Portis won’t hit 75 percent either. Conversely, Doug McDermott, Isaiah Canaan and Nikola Mirotic should all see rises in their percentages.

But there isn’t really anything that screams out that the Bulls have been obscenely lucky or unlucky with their shooting. It’s all pretty much balanced out, another indicator that this team might be for real.

Strength of schedule

Teams can be buoyed early in the season by soft schedules that give rise to an inflated record.

The Bulls have had a bunch of good luck in their schedule so far. They’ve played a number of teams on back-to-backs and missed a lot of superstar players because of injury. Their strenghth of schedule has been Charmin-soft — ESPN’s rankings give them the fifth-easiest schedule played thus far.

Still, people really like the Bulls. FiveThirtyEight now has them at 50 wins, and they’re creeping up everyone’s list of power rankings.

A week ago, I outlined the reasons why my skepticism is slowly being peeled back. The fact that the Bulls are stomping all over teams is truly impressive, and if Butler stays healthy he can carry the team on his own to at least being competitive on any given night.

However, I’m still not totally sold on this team. I knew that last year’s team was a fraud based on the numbers and eye test. My dark self-loathing Twitter rampages from last January back that up. I can’t say the same this year, although I still have my doubts that they can stay healthy and continue to keep making such difficult shots.

Still, I am way higher on this team than last year’s and I’ve changed my dire preseason prediction to a much more optimistic one. There’s nothing that suggests a massive regression is on the horizon, so I’m putting my doubts aside for now and enjoying what has become a pretty fun team to watch.