Since the NBA restart, some Chicago Bulls fans are asking whether the team should have drafted Michael Porter Jr., who plays with the Denver Nuggets. Porter, who is still a rookie despite being in the league for parts of two seasons, has shown his potential in the NBA bubble in Florida. Get the best NBA picks against the spread from BetQL for the rest of the NBA Playoffs in Orlando.
Porter is scoring better than 20 points a game having started all the Nuggets games in ESPN’s World Wide of Sports Complex but the increased workload has come with some reservations. Minutes limits that have come with the lack of playing defense have held back his full potential.
“I feel like I’d fit in great with those guys,” Porter said (via Chicago Tribune) of potentially joining the Bulls in the predraft process. “They have a great core, a lot of young, athletic guys. And they’re kind of looking for small forward.”
Injuries have also held Porter back in respect to being in the slam dunk contest. In his freshmen year at Missouri in 2017, he played in just 3 games because of back surgery, which was a microdiscectomy of two spinal discs, brought criticism of his ability in the short and long term. Porter was drafted by the Nuggets in 2018 and spent most of his first NBA season recovering from the back injury.
Porter stands at 6-foot-10 and his athleticism is amazing but could that be a reason to account for his injury history? Some have compared Porter to Kevin Durant, as Porter has a 7 foot 1/4 wingspan.
Bottom line for the Bulls is that they need star power besides Zach LaVine but with his injury history, it seems like a silver lining for the Bulls that they did not draft Porter. There’s no way of knowing how he would have done in Chicago but if it weren’t for the back injury he suffered from in his rookie year at Missouri, Porter would have been a very hot commodity.
Porter is taking his game to his full potential in the NBA restart and that will give teams headaches but if the narrative changes that Porter is beyond the days of injuries, teams such as the Bulls will regret not selecting him even more.
Basketball can be a volatile sport and to say that not picking Porter two years ago is a mistake two years from now assuming Porter gets past his injury days is not fair to critique the Bulls and others. Who has a crystal ball in predicting what will happen years from now when the focus is in the current times?
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