Winning wasn’t enough for Nikola Vučević.
Minutes after the Chicago Bulls won their seventh clutch game of the season on Saturday, the center was furious. He was tired of squandering leads and digging first-quarter holes. And as he was pulled aside for a walk-off interview on Chicago Sports Network, Vučević wasn’t in any mood to celebrate.
Vučević only made it halfway through delivering his indictment of the team’s performance — “For three quarters, we were very soft” — before teammates delivered an interruption. Matas Buzelis bounced in frame, fists pumping above his head.
Vučević shoved the younger forward away with the practiced ease of a father of three, manhandling the second-year forward with a muttered order: “Move.”
Buzelis shuffled off camera, defeated. Jalen Smith was less easily deterred. The backup center puffed out his chest, bumping into Vučević until he pivoted away, jaw clenched, not a trace of a smile threatening to break through his scowl. But Smith kept poking, imploring his veteran to lighten up: “Come on, man, be happy!”
In the four years since he first arrived in Chicago, Vučević has emerged as a mixture of scapegoat and villain in the eyes of many Bulls fans.
It’s easy to pin the team’s increasingly troublesome lack of defensive rigor on their big man in the middle. That clamor built into a rumbling din this season as the Bulls bleed points at the rim, allowing a league-high 21.8 baskets per game from within the restricted area.
In many ways, Vučević is untraditional. He’s not a top-5 blocker on his own team. He thrives in the pocket and behind the arc. And no, he’s not the most intimidating presence around the basket. Yet teammates and coaches don’t believe Vučević needs to change.
“People can say what they want to say,” guard Coby White said. “Everybody is entitled to their own opinion. Whatever. Who cares? He’s super important to what we do. We rely on him a lot.”
There is, of course, some truth in the criticism.
Vučević has never been an elite rim defender. It’s not his game. The center is elite on the boards — ranked seventh in the league this season in defensive rebounding — but his disruptiveness around the rim has always lagged behind his competition.
Opponents shoot 64.9% at the rim when Vučević contests the shot compared to their 65.6% average against others— a marginal 0.8% difference that reflects the negligible impact the center makes with his close-range defensive efforts. Tre Jones and Patrick Williams are the only players on the Bulls roster to allow a higher rim shooting percentage.
But this isn’t anything new. Across Vučević’s entire career, opponents averaged a difference of only 0.1% when the center contests a shot at the rim versus when he doesn’t. He contested only 42.7% — and blocked only 2.2% — of the total shots in his zone over the past 15 seasons.
Vučević made marginal improvement at the height of his career — dropping this percentage on contested shots down to 53.6% in 2018-19, the first season he was named an All-Star — but that number spiked back up to 62.5% in his last season in Orlando.
This year’s team might be exposing Vučević’s weaknesses more prominently — and painfully — but little has changed about the center’s defensive presence. And while the center isn’t helping the Bulls become a better defender, he’s also not the sole source for this deluge of shots at the rim.
“If we’re going to get it right, we have to defend as a team,” guard Josh Giddey said. “It can’t all be on one guy.”
This is not to say the Bulls wouldn’t benefit from a defensive stopper in the post. This team can’t get better without rim protection, a fact that has already worn away at this roster in the early weeks of the season. That need should define how the Bulls approach the draft and trade market next summer after Vučević’s current contract expires.
But for now, the Bulls have to focus on what they do have in the post.
When he first arrived in Chicago, Vučević wasn’t comfortable in the offense. He felt a steep loss of control without the ball in his hands. All too often, he got stuck in the corner, watching a play as it happened without him.
That dynamic changed last year. And this season, the Bulls are once again unlocking a better version of Vučević by realigning their center of gravity around the big man.
Vučević averages the 12th-most assists of any big man in the league and is currently tied for the third-highest 3-point volume among all NBA centers, racking up 2.1 per game alongside Nikola Jokić and Naz Reid. And the center only gets better in the moments that matter. The center has hit two true game-winners already this season and his shooting percentages have soared to 50% from behind the arc in clutch moments.
“He’s kind of like the hub, right?” White said. “We play through him at the top of the key. He’s our connector. He’s our leader. And obviously — he’s shown it — he makes big-time plays. He does a lot for this team. He’s super important to what we do, especially on the offensive end.”
Vučević has found his rhythm as the Bulls have picked up their pace.
On paper, an uptempo style might look like an awkward fit for a 35-year-old center. Vučević can get lost at times when the game opens up too much, especially if the Bulls fail to control the ball in transition and resort to rim-running for multiple possessions.
Vučević doesn’t want Donovan to run plays designed for him to generate shots. After years of operating as the offensive focal piece in Orlando, that’s not the center’s comfort zone anymore. But he can operate as a metronome for Bulls, speeding or slowing the pace of the game by moving the ball through the gut of the half-court.
Donovan describes Vučević’s vision for ideal basketball as almost utopic: high-motion, high-movement creation that encourages the ball to swing rapidly to produce a balanced volume of opportunities for every player on the court.
“A lot of times if we get a little bit stagnant or we’re playing a little bit too fast, he’s the one guy you can come back to who’s going to take the ball and get it from one side of the floor to the other,” Donovan said. “He’s going to create.”
But the defense needs to get better. Vučević isn’t arguing about that. He knows it. The entire Bulls roster knows it.
No amount of clutch scoring can change that fact. But at 35, Vučević also understands that his fundamental identity as a defender won’t change.
Other players on this roster — Buzelis, Ayo Dosunmu and Patrick Williams — are still growing into the best defensive versions of themselves. Vučević is long past that point in his career, and that’s okay. The veteran understands he can still improve his in-game impact by focusing on the small details that separate a good defensive performance from a poor one: eliminating mistakes, rotating more efficiently and keeping opponents off the offensive boards.
“Little details matter in this game, in this league,” Vučević said. “They add up. You might take away two points here, two points there, and the total might be six, eight points a game. But most games are decided within 10, five, six points. If you’re able to do this, it’s a big difference.”
Many athletes feign ignorance toward online chatter, even as they voraciously read headlines and social media posts. But Vučević is openly online, the type of guy who cracked jokes about house hunting in Utah after months of being implicated in trade rumors about Rudy Gobert.
So yes, Vučević sees the tweets. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones where a photo of him is edited to don a durag and hold a cigarette in his mouth. And while many athletes eschew social media during the season to avoid the toxicity of this outside noise, Vučević remains remarkably unfazed.
“Hey, it’s more fun than it’s not,” he said with a shrug after spending an afternoon earlier this year venting on X about his frustrations with the recent “Gladiator” sequel.
There is a confidence that comes from clarity. Vučević understands himself as a player. And this year more than ever, he understands his role.
Sometimes, it means stepping up as a hero, knocking down a 3-pointer as the shot clock switches to bright red. At others, that means playing the part of grumpy old man, snapping at youngsters on live television and chewing them out in the locker room after a game. Vučević embraces both responsibilities in equal measure.
“I’ve been in this league for 15 years,” Vučević said. “I’ve seen a lot of different situations. It’s normal when you’re a young player. It’s normal that you don’t know all these things. You don’t always understand what it really takes. That’s what veterans are there for.”