The Chicago Bulls’ season hasn’t gone well by any means. With a 5-14 record, the team has blown any chance of being competitive this season. There is a record lack of trust in head coach Billy Donovan and team morale in the locker room. All three of the Bulls’ All-Stars combined are statistically faring much worse than average. Zach LaVine leads the league in one significant statistic, which is an ironic twist that is both humorous and depressing.
It also shouldn’t be shocking given his past performance. Zach wasn’t given the best opportunity to succeed early on because he was drafted in the lottery by a Timberwolves team that would win just 16 games in his rookie season and never more than 31 games in any of his three seasons in Minnesota. But things wouldn’t get much better in Chicago, where the Bulls, under LaVine’s leadership, have finished with a losing record six of his seven seasons. The only exception occurred in 2021–2022, a year in which DeMar DeRozan overtook LaVine as the team’s best player.
You may wonder to what statistic I’m referring. percentage of loss, naturally! LaVine has the lowest winning percentage in the NBA among all eligible active players who have played in 500 or more games. LaVine has an embarrassingly low record of 211-362 in 573 games played thus far, good for a 36.8% win percentage.
With a win percentage of 39%, Alex Len is the next closest player, but he is still quite a ways off. Len is a reserve player as well, so he has some degree of plausible deniability when it comes to his team’s losing record.
Bulls guard Zach LaVine is statistically the NBA’s biggest loser, whether you think he’s to blame or not.
Given that Len is willing to be overlooked as a bench player, it is only fitting that we go further and search among the NBA’s elite players and seasoned veterans who have established themselves as starters for the next big loser. At that point, the Bulls’ situation becomes even more absurd and embarrassing.
Len is ranked second, followed by Gorgui Dieng, another bench player, in third place, and finally, you guessed it, Nikola Vucevic, the fourth-biggest loser among the league’s veterans. Vooch has a 338–504 career record and a 40.1% career winning percentage.
Among the other prominent players in the top 10 — er, the bottom 10 — are players like Julius Randle, D’Angelo Russell, and Jordan Clarkson. We’re not exactly keeping good company here, are we?
Unfortunately, in the ten years following the Derrick Rose era, the Bulls have promoted this culture. They just aren’t performing well enough, even with so much talent on this roster. Chicago has every right to compete on an equal footing with other middle-tier East teams like Atlanta and New York. In actuality, these players have established a reputation for being losers, and as long as it means they can pay their bills, they will happily keep losing.
The Chicago Bulls, like it or not, are in desperate need of a rebuild right now. The Bulls will benefit in the long run from trading Zach and setting off the explosive device that destroys this team. If LaVine is fortunate, he may even be traded to a team that will ultimately help him improve his win percentage.