PHILADELPHIA — Zach LaVine took a detour from his walk to the team bus to head over to a vending machine a few feet away this week after a loss to the Philadelphia 76ers. LaVine needed a snack and those Cheez-Its were calling for him. But when he swiped his card and pressed the button, nothing happened. He patiently swiped again and again, until eventually an arena staffer came over to assist him. One more swipe of the card later, two bags of cheese-flavored crackers plopped down and LaVine could leave the building, relieved that while the Chicago Bulls didn’t win the game, at least he got something he wanted in this arena.

Pressing the reset button on a franchise can be just as tricky as dealing with a faulty vending machine. Sometimes, the items get stuck in the dispenser, the machine doesn’t respond or the wrong button gets pressed and an unwanted item lands in the bin. When the Bulls decided last summer that it was time to move Jimmy Butler and begin their rebuild in earnest by acquiring LaVine, Lauri Markkanen and Kris Dunn in a draft-night deal, they understood the risks and accepted a pending struggle. But they didn’t want to be down for long and bank on a string of lottery picks to elevate them back to relevance. They wanted to stockpile some talent to make the losing more tolerable and the rebuild more manageable — but they might’ve stumbled upon a core.

“I think the thing for us now is, we’re not starting from rock bottom,” Bulls vice president of basketball operations John Paxson said. “We’ve got these three young talents and you can throw Bobby Portis in, he fits the direction that we’re headed in. We feel we’re headed in the right direction. But we don’t want to oversell anything. We know to win at the highest level in this league you need the great players, and, hopefully, we’ve got one or two of them, somewhere on our roster, that we can grow with and hopefully make the decisions going forward to add to that.”

View photos The Bulls appear to have stumbled on an excellent core with Lauri Markkanen, Kris Dunn and Zach LaVine. (AP) More

The beginning of this rebuild wasn’t pretty. Dunn broke his finger, Portis broke Nikola Mirotic’s face during a fight in practice, and the Bulls were so dreadful that they almost made fans nostalgic for those initial seasons under Tim Floyd after the Jordan dynasty ended. Then, miraculously, the Bulls caught fire after Mirotic returned, and true haters panned the relative success because the team couldn’t even tank properly. “It’s not our decision to go out there and tank. This is our livelihood. You step between those lines, you’re not going to give in to anybody, regardless of who it is or what people are going to tell you,” LaVine told Yahoo Sports. “We go out there to win.”

Chicago has since settled into being a highly competitive and exciting team with an encouraging future. Somewhere between when Portis’ punch connected on Oct. 17 and when Dunn had an unfortunate face plant following a dunk on Jan. 17 that resulted in him entering concussion protocol, the Bulls learned that the three pieces they acquired from Minnesota to help “jump-start” the rebuild process might actually form the foundation.

View photos Lauri Markkanen may have the makings of a franchise player. (Getty Images) More

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