Polling place
The Bulls got better with the lateMarch trades that landed a big fish — center Nikola Vucevic — from the Magic, didn’t they? Maybe a lot better.
In this week’s “Polling Place,” your home for Sun-Times sports polls on Twitter, we asked respondents if the Bulls improved their roster enough to make it to the playoffs for the first time since 2017. Of course, that’ll be a lot easier with playin spots broadening the field from the traditional eight teams per conference to 10.
“By staying healthy, building chemistry and all players finding their roles to contribute,” @javierhjr commented, “they could be very competitive.”
And what about the Blackhawks? They’ve been doing the one-step-forward, two-steps-back thing lately, but they’re still in the hunt for the fourth and final playoff spot in the Central Division. Will they nail it down in the end?
Lastly, we offered a choice between the Bulls and Hawks: Which team will be really good first? “None of the above,” @PaulRome51 wrote.
There’s always somebody. On to the polls:
Upshot: It’s about stacking wins, as they say, now that Vucevic and Zach LaVine are growing accustomed to each other, Patrick Williams is continuing to develop, Thaddeus Young keeps making everyone around him better and so on. The Bulls probably could play .500 ball the rest of the way and find themselves in a play-in situation, but they want to do better than that. What a nice change it would be.
Upshot: There are a lot of young pieces to like here — Alex DeBrincat, Dominik Kubalik, Kirby Dach, Adam Boqvist, Kevin Lankinen and a handful of others — and the biggest unknown is whether they can maintain the collective edge needed to win key games against fellow hopefuls. It would be mighty nice if Dach, who missed the bulk of the season, got on a goalscoring tear.
Upshot: It’s hard not to look up at the clock after seeing Patrick Kane and Duncan Keith on the ice. Can the Hawks really make a Cup push before those two are off to the shuffleboard circuit? “Blackhawks core is getting older,” @popsofone offered. “Bulls are young and only getting better.” As you can see, a big majority of respondents is taking swallows from the Bulls’ kool-aid trough.