Did Chicago Bulls get enough back?

The Chicago Bulls finally completed the most complicated task in kick-starting a rebuild: trading longtime star Zach LaVine.

Regret seemed to seize the Bulls the moment LaVine signed a maximum contract with the team in 2022. At the time, executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas and the rest of the front office believed any contract could be movable — even a supermax. But that proved to be quite untrue.

It didn’t matter that LaVine was the Bulls’ best scorer or one of the best shooting guards in the league. The weight of his five-year, $215 million deal became a cumbersome riddle the front office couldn’t solve.

Karnišovas finally found a solution Sunday: a three-team deal in which the Bulls sent LaVine to the Sacramento Kings and a 2028 second-round pick to the San Antonio Spurs in exchange for Kevin Huerter, Tre Jones, Zach Collins and the rights to their own first-round pick in 2025. The Bulls announced Monday they waived forward Torrey Craig and guard Chris Duarte in a corresponding move.

The Bulls now can move past the challenge of moving LaVine. But as the dust settles on a tumultuous weekend of NBA trades, one question lingers around this deal: Did the Bulls get enough back for their best player?

Every trade must be graded in context. A year ago, the Bulls couldn’t move LaVine at all. The trade deadline was a non-starter, and the summer was curiously quiet.

But LaVine attacked this season with vigor, reshaping himself into a levelheaded leader and efficient scorer who earned quiet praise around the league. That helped position the Bulls to finally find a trade partner.

That context is important for understanding the four assets the Bulls received in exchange for Lavine. While the trio of players adds reasonable value — particularly Huerter, whose 3-point shooting could be crucial for the Bulls offense — their arrival is mostly a byproduct of the need to take enough contracts back to make the trade viable.

Outside of offloading LaVine’s contract, the main victory of this trade for the Bulls is the reclamation of their 2025 first-round pick, which was previously owed to the Spurs as part of the 2021 trade for DeMar DeRozan.

The pick was top-10 protected, so the Spurs would have owned it unless the Bulls finished in the bottom third of the standings. If the pick was not conveyed this year, it would have been owed in a future draft. With ownership of the pick fully returned to the Bulls now, the front office no longer has to worry about jumping through hoops to maintain its draft position.

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This is a sizable gain for the Bulls. Yes, it was a failure they gave up so much to acquire DeRozan. The front office never should have put itself in a position to be scrabbling over a top-10 protected pick in 2025. But that was the reality for the Bulls — and the front office got itself out of that situation.

Still, the fact remains the Bulls have gone through three trade deadlines and three consecutive trades — including last summer’s sign-and-trade deal that sent DeRozan to the Kings and the trade of Alex Caruso to the Oklahoma City Thunder — without adding a single new first-round pick.