The 1-7 Bulls are a disaster, and that's putting it mildly

“If the Bulls are awful and you don’t get the [Josh] Giddey answers you want . . . yeesh. They wouldn’t be in an impossible spot by any means, but you’d run the risk of prolonging the road to sustained success. Bulls fans deserve a lot better.” — Nekias Duncan, Yahoo Sports, October 20, 2026

‘Trash.”

Too harsh, right? Too soon, you think? The unfair but not necessarily wrong descriptive to use in describing the Bulls’ overall entrance into this season.

A 43-point loss. A 35-point loss. A 19-point second-half lead lost in a loss to the defending champs that made the incumbents feel like it was June and not October. And the next time they played the Knicks, just a week later, (in a game where Jalen Brunson outscored the entire Bulls team in the first quarter, his 22 to their 21) the Bulls gave up 84 points in the first half to go along with another 30-point loss to add to the list.

They had us at “Hello.”

To say the new, overhauled, new face-of-the-franchise, new front office, new coach and coaching staff Chicago Bulls squad’s introduction has been “less than” would be less than generous. The condemnation of a team and its season less than 10 games in has not yet arrived. But it is upon us.

As bad as things have been for the Bulls in recent decades it’s hard to say that they’ve had a start to a season like this one. Giving up 129.6 points per game through the first eight. Just a point over the 1990-91 Nuggets’ all-time record of 130.7. Not that that’s going to continue for the duration for the Bulls, but early, small-sampled, historical context matters, right? So if defense is the major key to winning a chip — then what is the end resulting assessment of anti-defense?

The mollywaps keep stacking. Questions keep piling. Uncertainty has their number.

Owners of the largest negative point differential in the League outside of Sacramento. It’s not that the Bulls don’t want or can’t play defense, they just haven’t learned how yet.
Collaboratively. And the singular, bigger problem they face other than that is that teams know, prepare and prey on that exact fact.

Next to last in field-goal percentage (41.2), dead last in three-point FG% (27.2). In the latest Knicks game they hit their first two threes of the game, then proceeded to miss their next 20 in a row — all in the first half. Putting up a total of 44 for the game. Making only 10. Who do they think they are: the 2024-25 Celtics? Somehow they’ve still found a way to lead the eague this season in free-throw attempts.

Which, of course, is on-brand negated by being 25th in the league in FT%. (Also 22nd in the league in turnovers and 28th in personal fouls, just to keep things 1,000%.

All of it is an unfair disadvantage that Tiago Splitter and Co. are going to have to figure out faster than immediately. Where even once they hit that 10-game threshold and they’re, say, 2-8, if they’ve found a way to drop that PPGA average to at or below 116, that would be miracle-ish.

Enough to make a blue state See Red.

This is the find out. What we asked for from ownership. New everything across the board. Since the trade-deadline fire sale last season, it seemed like every move they made was in the direction of making sure they were going to replicate the latest version of the other Reinsdorf-owned franchise across town. Not the basketball version of the previous three years of it.

Tryna put the pieces of them together, puzzling. Coaches, players. Players, players. No one really knows one another. Uncertainty is stalking. This early-season rush to the bottom is not the look this team wants to give out to be received as representative of who they are and destined to become.

Splitter is preaching resilience to Caleb Wilson. Acknowledging both his future star’s bad body language in games when they get behind by a lead that seems insurmountable and also keeping in mind that losing like this up until now, throughout the entire 20-years of his life, has been a totally unexperienced experience for the rookie. The same tempered level of grace and tough understanding the outside seems to be giving the team by taking all things unknown by them, about themselves, into perspective and consideration.

The work that needs to be done seems unconquerable. But not unattainable or an unreasonable ambition. Not yet, at least. Because breaking the generational cycle of losing they inherited won’t be easy to ghost or avoid. The bottom loves company and misery. Plus failure.

Organizational restructuring and accumulating young talent are less powerful in this particular instance than patience and prayer. Both allies for this team. If the Pope one Sunday shows up in Saint Peter’s Basilica for Mass wearing a Bulls cap, they might have a chance.

As long as they can evade the “trash” talk.

The bottom’s calling. Preying on ’em. And the Bulls aren’t really trying to swipe right.