Chicago Bulls select Matas Buzelis in the 2024 NBA Draft
The Chicago Bulls are bringing forward Matas Buzelis home. On Wednesday night, the Bulls selected the Chicago native with the No. 11 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft.
Matas Buzelis spent one year with G-League Ignite, opting to skip college despite offers from programs like North Carolina, Kentucky, Florida State and Wake Forest. He’s a Chicago native that went to Hinsdale Central before transferring out to Brewster Academy during 2020.
Matas Buzelis did participate in a USA Basketball minicamp back in 2022 and also led powerhouse Brewster Academy to a 31-8 record and a New England prep school championship. Following his high school career, he wanted to elevate his game and get better by joining G-League Ignite. That allowed him to polish his game even more in the draft process.
He becomes the third Chicago native to be drafted by the Bulls, joining Derrick Rose and Ayo Dosunmu in previous drafts.
The scouting report on Matas Buzelis
The 6-foot-10, 209-pound forward was projected to be a top 10 pick in the lottery but fell to No. 11 where the hometown Bulls took him. Here is the scouting report on Buzelis from NBADraft.net:
Matas Buzelis is a prospect from the Chicago area who comes from family were both of his parents were pro hoopers in Lithuania before moving to the US…He has a decorated amateur swimming background and eventually became one of the best HS basketball players in the nation as a consensus top 10 recruit in the 2023 HS class…He played in the 2022 Hoop Summit and was a McDonalds AA in 2023 as well…
After stops that included basketball powerhouses Brewster Academy & Sunrise Christian Academy his last 3 years of HS, Buzelis chose to play for the G-League Ignite over going to college…It was a distrastrous season for the Ignite program, one that included a 2-32 record and a notice from Adam Silver that the NBA was shutting down the league, but Buzelis had a reasonably productive season…He showed pretty much all of the things we knew about him as a prep prospect; his nice size and physical tools as a 6’10 combo forward, versatility on both ends of the court, basketball instincts, exciting finishing ability and the budding point-forward skill set…
He also is still going to need to polish all of his skills more and continue to grow into his body to maximize his athleticism and overall potential as a player, because there will be alot more of what he struggled with in the Ignite program to come at the NBA level if he doesn’t attack the weight room and add mass to his frame…The framework of a modern combo forward with mismatch skills and positional versatility is there, but its going to be about shoring up some key areas in all areas of his game that see him live up to his draft billing … Buzelis is projected to be taken in the first half of the lottery …
The Bulls could be entering a rebuild after trading Alex Caruso and there are rumblings that they might not bring back DeMar DeRozan and could look to trade Zach LaVine. This draft is key for the Bulls as they actually held their pick and were able to get a young talent like Matas Buzelis.
Moving forward the Bulls still have the lottery protected pick from Portland for 2025 but do have their own first-round picks in 2026 and 2027. As of now, they do not have a second round pick in this draft so if they do want to add more players to the roster, they will likely need to trade back into the draft to do so.
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