NBA teams tend to have a handful of former lottery picks on their roster, but the Chicago Bulls have a lot more than that. The Bulls bizarrely have 10 former lottery picks, and perhaps even more surprisingly, not a single one has made an All-Star or an All-NBA team.
1. Noa Essengue: 12th pick, 2025
2. Rob Dillingham: 8th pick, 2024
3. Matas Buzelis: 11th pick, 2024
4. Jaden Ivey: 5th pick, 2022
5. Josh Giddey: 6th pick, 2021
6. Patrick Williams: 4th pick, 2020
7. Isaac Okoro: 5th pick, 2020
8. Jalen Smith: 10th pick, 2020
9. Collin Sexton: 8th pick, 2018
10. Zach Collins: 10th pick, 2017
Now, obviously, a lot of these players didn’t become lottery picks because of the Bulls. Noa Essengue, Matas Buzelis, and Patrick Williams were the only ones they drafted. It’s still bewildering, though, that there is only one player there who you can say with a certain level of certainty will become an All-Star one day.
We are, of course, talking about Josh Giddey. Giddey is averaging 18.1 points, 8.2 rebounds, 8.5 assists, 0.9 steals, and 0.5 blocks per game in 2025-26. It won’t be all too surprising if the 23-year-old ends up averaging a triple-double for an entire season at some point in the future.
Now, one might argue that Buzelis could turn into a star as well, but have we seen enough? Well, the 21-year-old’s numbers have gone up across the board in his sophomore campaign. Buzelis is averaging 15.0 points, 5.4 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 0.7 steals, and 1.5 blocks per game in 2025-26. While he definitely isn’t a bust, it is hard to say if he is going to be that franchise cornerstone player someday.
Speaking of busts, Williams is unfortunately just that. He is averaging 6.9 points and 2.9 rebounds per game, but is in the second year of a five-year, $90 million deal. Not only did the Bulls make a mistake by drafting him, but they then made things worse by giving him that extension.
Isaac Okoro and Jalen Smith are two other top-10 picks from Williams’ class that haven’t panned out. Okoro is a fine defensive wing, but hasn’t developed offensively. He is averaging 9.2 points per game this season and is just a solid role player at this point.
Zach Collins falls into that category as well. Collins averaged 9.7 points and 5.6 rebounds in 10 games this season. He has now been ruled out for the rest of the campaign, too, after undergoing toe surgery.
Injuries are the story when it comes to Jaden Ivey as well. Ivey flashed star potential at the start of his career with the Detroit Pistons, but he hasn’t been the same since suffering a broken left fibula on Jan. 1, 2025. He has averaged 8.5 points, 2.5 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 0.6 steals, and 0.4 blocks per game for the Pistons and Bulls in 2025-26.
Alarmingly, Ivey recently admitted he is not the player he used to be. He said that the old J.I. is dead, and that is quite heartbreaking to hear. Ivey has been ruled out for two weeks now due to a sore left knee, and you wonder if we’ll ever see him at anywhere near his best again.
Sticking with injured players, Essengue played just two games in his rookie season before he was ruled out for the rest of the campaign after undergoing shoulder surgery. The Frenchman did not impress in the little we saw of him, but it’s too early to deliver any kind of verdict on him.
It might not be too early to declare that Rob Dillingham is a bust, though. The Minnesota Timberwolves selected Dillingham with that eighth pick and shipped him out of town less than two years later. That’s usually not a good sign.
Dillingham is averaging 7.8 points per game for the Bulls, and there are doubts about whether he’ll even turn into a productive role player in the NBA. He has time on his side, though.
Lastly, we get to Collin Sexton, who was thought of as a potential star at one point. Sexton averaged 24.3 points per game for the Cavaliers back in 2020-21, but has turned out to be just a good scoring guard. He has put up 12.3 points per game for the Bulls since arriving via trade from the Charlotte Hornets before the trade deadline.
In all, this is quite the collection of players. You’d imagine there would be more quality here, but there isn’t. That’s down to some poor drafting on the Bulls’ part and their inability to land quality young prospects via trades. There have been very few hits like Giddey, and so it’s no surprise that this team last won a playoff series back in 2015.
