Giddey’s NBA crossroads explained... and $138m dilemma behind Bulls’ biggest question
Josh Giddey is entering the biggest season of his young career and there is one big question hanging over his move to Chicago — although it is just one of many headaches for the Bulls.
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When talking about Josh Giddey, whether it is the elite playmaking, defensive deficiencies or inconsistent 3-point shooting, it is easy to forget that he only turned 22 years old last week.
Because for all the scepticism about Giddey’s real ceiling in the NBA, it was only a couple of years ago that he was making history as the youngest ever player to record a triple-double.
Now, you can debate the true value of triple-doubles in the modern NBA as a barometer of a player’s value all you want, but there is little doubting Giddey was having a real impact on winning in his rookie season for a team that wasn’t doing a whole lot of it.
Fast forward three years and Giddey enters his fourth season in the NBA at a crossroads.
Having made a name for himself at Oklahoma City, it quickly became clear at the back-end of last season that a change of scenery would be beneficial for both parties.
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For the Thunder, it would allow them to net an elite defensive piece in Alex Caruso who should fit in seamlessly to the championship-contending roster Sam Presti is building.
It also gave coach Mark Daigneault the freedom to lean more heavily into Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and, more importantly, Jalen Williams, as their backcourt duo of the future.
As for Giddey, the off-ball role he found himself playing at Oklahoma City last season was clearly not playing into his strengths and the hope is that he can be the focal piece of a Bulls team that has spent the last few seasons trying to find its identity.
The plan, it appears, is for Chicago’s once slow-paced offence to go in a completely different direction this season, pushing the pace in a new era of Bulls basketball.
Giddey, with his exceptional passing and court vision, can help achieve that.
But as much as this is a defining season for the Bulls and where this franchise is headed, both in the short and long-term, it is also just as important for Giddey on an individual front.
While Chicago obviously traded for Giddey with an understanding that he could be a key part of the roster both now and into the future, he is also entering the final year of his rookie deal.
It leaves the Bulls in an intriguing position where they may be better served waiting to see how Giddey fits onto this team before committing to him on any long-term contract extension.
Equally for Giddey, the question is whether he can get his still extremely young career back on an upwards trajectory in Chicago, because if he can’t then attention will turn to whether any other teams may have interest in offering the 22-year-old that new deal.
All of this is to say the 2024-25 season shapes as the most significant yet in Giddey’s career and here foxsports.com.au breaks down what it could look like and the big decision the Bulls will have to make.
WHAT IS HIS ROLE GOING TO BE?
Let’s start here because even if Giddey is the starting point guard, that isn’t really the question.
The bigger question is what that role looks like in this Bulls roster, because like Oklahoma City this is a spot where Giddey is obviously best with his hands on the ball but will have plenty of competition for touches.
After all, Chicago is also incentivised to at least somewhat run the offence through Zach LaVine, who has consistently been the topic of trade discussions but the Bulls aren’t exactly in a strong bargaining position given his contract.
LaVine signed a five-year, $215 million max contract extension back in 2022 and he has three years and nearly $138 million left on that deal, which makes it hard to convince any team to want to take on the 29-year-old when he is owed that much money.
It will be even harder if he is not a focal point of the offence this season, because ideally the Bulls need to have LaVine playing at an All-Star level again to prove he is worth trading for.
Having him playing a largely off-ball role, however, where he is unable to get into any sort of rhythm and is more of a complementary piece next to Giddey and Coby White wouldn’t achieve that.
Speaking of White, he had a breakout 2023-24 campaign and while he is more capable than Giddey of playing off the ball, it’s not like the Bulls will want to completely go away from him after what he showed last season.
The same goes for Ayo Dosunmu, while you also add the returning Lonzo Ball into the mix.
The perfect scenario for the Bulls would be finding a way to get value out of LaVine and Nikola Vučević’s contracts while also taking a step towards building a future centred around Giddey, White, rookie combo forward Matas Buzelis and Patrick Williams, who signed a five-year, $90 million deal with the Bulls in June.
But finding a way to perfectly balance all of those competing interests seems like a tricky task as Will Gottlieb, lead writer and podcast co-host for CHGO, laid out.
“He forces you to be a certain way and I think that is the big question with this team. How are they going to respond to that?” Gottlieb said on the ‘CHGO Chicago Bulls Podcast’.
“Are they going to lean into it and put shooting and spacing around him and if they do that, what does that mean for the other guys on the roster? What does that mean for the usage of guys like Coby, Ayo and Patrick?
“Beyond that, why didn’t that work in OKC? To me, I think it’s not really about what kind of counting stats does he provide or does his usage get higher or lower?
“I just want to know, is this the guy the Bulls are trying to build around and if so, can he prove that he’s really worth that? Is this guy a foundational piece, because if he’s not then it’s very difficult to make him a complementary piece, and if he is – great, how do you build around him?”
Which, again, goes to the core of why this is such an important season for Giddey.
In an ideal world, Giddey is the primary playmaker for a Bulls team on the rise, forming a perfect combination with White in the backcourt and agrees to an extension which locks him up as one of the new faces of the franchise for years to come.
There is a world where that happens, especially when you consider the way Giddey could fit into the new-look offence the Bulls want to run this season, with coach Billy Donovan speaking of wanting to play at a faster pace that creates points-scoring opportunities in transition.
Giddey spoke at the media day about how there had been an “emphasis” on generating early looks in the pre-season by playing scrimmages with 14-second shot clocks.
“Once it becomes a habit this team is going to be pretty scary to deal with in the open court,” he added.
For a player like Giddey, standing at 6-foot-8 and with the kind of elite court vision he has, he can absolutely be the main guy who gets Chicago’s transition game going.
It will be particularly helpful if Giddey can have a consistent presence on the defensive glass too, because that will only make it easier for him to get his hands on the ball sooner in generating fastbreak opportunities.
But as much as Giddey has the tools to make full-court passes and fit balls into tight windows, he also has a habit of trying too much — of attempting passes not far from trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle.
It is something Giddey conceded at media day and something the Bulls knew when they traded for him, that some days you have to take the bad with the good.
It won’t all pay off. Sometimes Giddey will turn it over in an attempt to get the ball zipping up the court, but with time he will find the right balance.
“I’ve got confidence in myself where maybe there’s passes I can’t make that I think I can in my head and I try to make them and they aren’t probably there in the moment but I guess it’s a confidence thing,” Giddey said at media day.
“As a passer you can’t live on the edge, you can’t be hesitant to throw passes because there’s going to be times you turn the ball over, it’s just about doing that in moderation and I spoke with Billy about that.
“Throughout the Olympics that was one of the things if I could go back and clean up on the turnovers. A lot of it wasn’t lack of ball-handling, a lot of it was careless passes and things that are so easily fixable.
“I’ve always been a pass-first guy, so if I’m going to be making those plays you want to look after the ball.”
Of course, as much as the Bulls may be looking for Giddey to be their primary facilitator, they also need him to be a consistent scoring threat — whether that means getting to the rim or not hesitating when the ball comes his way and the 3-point shot is open.
All Giddey needs to do is earn enough respect from the opposition so that they properly close out on him or have to account for him driving to the rim and aren’t always defending him knowing he is looking for the pass first.
Giddey showed flashes of that during his time at Oklahoma City and more consistently proved himself capable of finishing at the rim when playing a more ball-dominant role for the Boomers, so the Bulls can take confidence in knowing that version of Giddey is in there somewhere.
Giddey’s teammates certainly take confidence in knowing the kind of playmaker he is, with both LaVine and White speaking glowingly of the Australian at media day.
“We have a hell of a playmaker in Josh,” LaVine said.
“I understand the roles that I play but there isn’t a situation or role I haven’t been successful in and if it needs to be on the ball one day, off the ball defending, rebounding, leadership – there isn’t a role I’m not comfortable with.”
“He’s obviously a really big guard,” added White.
“He can really pass the ball, has a high IQ, is really competitive, has an edge to him. That’s the thing I like about him the most. He’s super competitive, loves to win, he’s not going to back down.”
White also said he was happy to play off the ball if needed, telling reporters he has been playing “different roles” his whole career and would “thrive” if asked to adapt his game.
Giddey said it is a “big luxury” to have so many ball-handlers at Chicago, adding that all the players have spoken about the importance of “sacrificing” for each other this season.
It is something coach Donovan emphasised during his media day press conference too.
“They’re all going to have to sacrifice,” Donovan said.
“We can’t have one guy with the ball in their hands all the time. We’ve got to play in a way that showcases and plays to the strengths of all those guys.”
Speaking of sacrifice, the Bulls as a franchise should be in a position where they are prepared to sacrifice some wins in the short-term to give their fans a reason to be optimistic about the future.
Whether Giddey is part of that future remains to be seen, as does whether the Bulls will pay him before the season tips off.
WILL THE BULLS PAY HIM NOW?
It was always going to be hard for Oklahoma City to commit to paying Giddey, with Gilgeous-Alexander eligible to sign a supermax extension in the 2025 offseason while Williams and Chet Holmgren will also soon be rookie extension eligible.
It also quickly became clear that if Giddey’s future was at Oklahoma City it was likely to be in a bench role, which would have put a serious cap on how much he could have earned with his next deal.
For the Bulls, it is a question of whether they try to get a deal done before the season to capitalise on the fact Giddey’s value is still relatively low while at the same time risking not seeing exactly how he fits and whether he in fact should be a key building block.
It is a point Keith Smith, an NBA Salary Cap Analyst at Spotrac, made in mid-September when asked whether he thought the Bulls would work out a deal with Giddey before the season tips off.
“Let’s see what this looks like because holy crap, as currently constructed, there are a lot of guys that need the ball in their hands on that team,” Smith said on the ‘Game Theory Podcast w/ Sam Vecenie’.
“I have no idea how that’s going to go for Josh Giddey. I’ve had people say, ‘Well Oklahoma City had a lot of guys and he had the ball in his hands’. Not like this. This is like a whole other thing.
“In Oklahoma City, there was a hierarchy. Here, I don’t know what the hierarchy is anymore because not much about this team makes a whole lot of sense.”
With that in mind, Smith went on to say that he thinks the Bulls are almost better served either committing to Giddey now or otherwise sending him away by the trade deadline.
“... I don’t know if there’s an in between where it’s like, ‘Let’s just see how the season goes and figure it out’, because I think there’s a good chance he averages close to a triple double this year,” Smith added.
“... That becomes a selling point, that’s still real to an awful lot of people.”
ESPN’s Front Office Insider Bobby Marks, meanwhile, said on the ‘Lowe Post podcast’ that if a deal is done by the start of the season the “initial reaction will be that Chicago overpaid”.
He went on to explain that on the one hand, the Bulls could decide that if they are going to let the offence run through Giddey they may as well use the first year as a “barometer” for what his next contract could look like.
Otherwise, when considering the flashes Giddey showed in the Olympics and the fact they gave up Alex Caruso to get him in the first place, they could just decide he is “our guy going forward” and make him an offer to reflect that reality, even if it means overpaying.
For Giddey’s camp, it is a matter of working out how much interest is actually out there for him and using it as leverage against the Bulls or otherwise, if the opposite is true, it puts Chicago in a powerful position to make what it believes to be a reasonable offer with the promise of letting Giddey run the offence.
And if Giddey is more interested in the money than having a larger role, then the Bulls can let the market speak for itself while they prioritise giving opportunities to other players like White and LaVine, if he is still on the team.
All of this is to say that, like Giddey’s role on the team itself, his contract situation is just as complicated — and it makes for quite the interesting subplot entering the season.
Originally published as Giddey’s NBA crossroads explained... and $138m dilemma behind Bulls’ biggest question
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