When the Chicago Bulls signed Pau Gasol to a discounted three-year, $22 million deal with a player option on the final season, they couldn’t have expected that he would be this good. With two All-Star appearances in two seasons and at 35 years old, Gasol is still one of the league’s best big men. He’s also looking at that third-year player option this summer, and the Bulls are naturally assuming that he’ll opt out. Due to this uncertainty, the Bulls have put Gasol in an all too familiar place — the trading block.
According to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports, the Bulls are “aggressively shopping” Gasol in advance of Thursday’s deadline.
For some reason, Gasol was constantly the subject of trade rumors while he was with the Los Angeles Lakers. This is nothing new to the veteran, and he will likely brush it off. If Chicago does end up moving their starting center however, they need to get serious assets back in return.
Gasol has been invaluable to the Bulls since his arrival, going beyond expectations and being the team’s second best player, behind Jimmy Butler. Losing Gasol means losing 17.0 points, 10.9 rebounds, 3.4 assists, and 2.0 blocks on a slash line of .479/.410/.806.
On a per-36 minute basis, his numbers are even more impressive at 19.2 points, 12.3 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 2.2 blocks. According to ESPN.com, Gasol is fifth among centers in real plus-minus and is responsible for 8.18 “RPM wins”, an estimate of the number of victories Gasol contributed towards the Bulls’ total on the season judged by using his individual RPM and number of possessions played. Not surprisingly, Gasol is second behind just Butler in that category. His value to this roster can’t be overstated, but the fact that the Bulls were built to win now also needs to be taken into account.
This isn’t a team that should be stocking up on draft picks. The Bulls made the switch from Tom Thibodeau to Fred Hoiberg because they thought their new coach could take them to the promised land. So far the switch hasn’t panned out as the team is offensively oriented yet ranked just 25th in offensive rating, and is one of the league’s most stagnant teams on that end. They’ve lost four in a row and seven of their last ten, slipping all the way to the seventh seed.
Unless the Bulls can pull off a trade for one of the other stars that will be available, dealing away Gasol is a sign that they are giving up on this core of players.
