Matas Buzelis is living through the kind of early-season stretch that can make a young player feel like the whole league is watching every missed shot. With the Chicago Bulls off to a 1-6 start, the 22-year-old has taken plenty of heat, and his first seven games have done little to quiet it.
The numbers tell the story. Buzelis is putting up 13.0 points, 4.3 rebounds and 1.9 assists a night, but he’s doing it on 40.0 percent shooting from the field and 29.0 percent from three.
He’s taking 4.4 attempts from deep per game, and while his free throw volume has climbed to 5.3 tries a night, the overall offensive output has been uneven. On the other end, he hasn’t been making the same kind of defensive splash either, with fewer weak-side blocks and little impact on the perimeter.
Monday in Philadelphia was his roughest night yet. In the Bulls’ 126-107 loss to the 76ers, Buzelis played 23 minutes and finished with four points, five turnovers and four fouls. He didn’t get to the line for the first time this season, and his five shot attempts were a season low.
That game came against a difficult matchup, whether it was the Sixers’ quick guards or their veteran wings. Even so, Buzelis has shown enough over his first two seasons to suggest this is not who he is for long.
After the loss, he addressed the slow start and kept his message steady.
“If you guys can recall, every one of my beginning of my seasons, first and second, they were tough," Buzelis told Joel Lorenzi of The Athletic. "It was difficult.
New guys coming in. This year it’s even harder … Right now, you got to really really zone in and focus on what you can control and what you can do out there.
As I keep saying, it’s a process, it's a process. I promise you I’ll figure it out.”
That kind of patience fits what his first two seasons looked like. As a rookie, Billy Donovan kept his role limited, and Buzelis reached double figures only once in his first 16 games.
In Year 2, his numbers stayed in a similar range early before he broke out in December. The path hasn’t been linear, but the evidence from his game log backs up his point.
There’s also a bigger adjustment happening around him. The Bulls are a new-look team, and Buzelis is trying to find his place in it while sharing possessions with Caleb Wilson.
That means fewer touches to go around, and there are stretches when both players want the same space on the floor. Add Norman Powell into the mix, and the shot diet gets even tighter.
None of that makes Buzelis a bad fit. It just means his role has changed, and he’s having to figure out where his game lives in this version of the Bulls. That’s part of the larger picture for Chicago, too: figuring out how its top two young players can grow into something that actually works together.
That answer won’t arrive in a hurry. For now, the Bulls have to keep building the sample size, and Buzelis sounds ready to keep grinding through it.
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