Kalin Lucas

Kalin Lucas - Signed by the Bulls for training camp, but never with a legitimate chance of making the team, Lucas too has hit the D-League, and is averaging 17.7 points and 5.7 assists. However, he too is no half court point passing guard, instead often a scorer, a status undermined by his diminutive stature and merely decent jump-shot. He must improve two of the playmaking, defense and shooting to make it back.

After signing Erik Murphy to a $250,000 guaranteed deal and waiving Richard Hamilton and Malcolm Thomas, the Chicago Bulls had only 12 players under contract. They wanted to bring in veterans Mike James, Dexter Pittman, D.J. White and Dahntay Jones to fight for roster spots. They did not, however, want to pay them anything to do so.

The Bulls thus sought to sign those four to deals incorporating Exhibit 9. But they could not do so until they had 14 contracts. They thus signed undrafted rookie guards Kalin Lucas and Patrick Christopher to unguaranteed yet exhibit 9-less deals before signing those four veterans, thereby meeting the threshold for being able to give out exhibit 9?s, and subsequently signed the vet quartet to four deals containing them.

Lucas and Christopher were waived on the second day of camp. They never stood a chance of making it. An unconfirmed report further suggests that the duo did not even partake in practice – had they done so, they might have gotten hurt. And had they done so, the taxpaying Bulls might have been liable for a hefty bill. As cutthroat as it is, this is business – if someone was going to get hurt in camp, the Bulls wanted it to happen as cheaply as possible. So they protected themselves.

In the end, it has mattered not. White, Pittman and Jones have all been waived – the only surviving unguaranteed contracts are the partially guaranteed deal of Murphy and the Exhibit 9 of James. James seems to have made the team, even without a trade of Marquis Teaque, due in part to the Bulls’s need to meet the minimum roster requirement of 13 players. (They may waive James later when Kurt Thomas is fit to play again, yet he survives for now.)

Nonetheless, even though the finagling ultimately didn’t save the Bulls anything, it was engineered in such a way that it could have done. This is either shrewd asset management and smart business savvy, or an overly callous piece of manipulation by a habitually cheap franchise, depending on your perspective.

Kalin Lucas - Lucas's stock has cooled off during the last couple of years, due in no small part to an injury which he nobly battled through but which clearly slowed him down. When healthy, Lucas is a decent scoring guard, best in transition and fairly crafty if small in the paint, with a decent jumpshot and defensive effort to boot. But his once first round stock has cooled considerably.

Further compounding the problem has been the struggles of team leader Kalin Lucas, who got injured at the end of last season, and who has been noticably hobbled all season. Lucas nevertheless leads the team in scoring, as is the case every year, using his transition ability and use of screens to get open for jumpshots and into the paint, a high IQ undersized scorer that doesn't have to resort to calling 1-4 sets all the time. Lucas has been stuck on full-on scorer's mode all season, by design and quite correctly, forgoing point guard play other than to get the ball over halfcourt and start moving it around. He has been effective at doing this, even with the gimpiness, pouring in 17.2 points per game with 39% three point shooting, both very respectable numbers. But perhaps without the injury, he probably could have cracked 20.