Wolves vs Bulls

7:00pm CST

FS North

The Wolves come in hot by their standards, sitting at 2-2 over their last four games. Not exactly blazing, but when you’ve lost as much as the Wolves have, well, any sort of decent play is to be celebrated. Of course, one of those wins includes the win last evening in New Orleans, which featured key contributions from pretty much every player who got playing time.

Chicago is coming off a pretty nice win in their own right, holding off the Dallas Mavericks on Monday. The Bulls, much like the Wolves, aren’t really playing for anything, and their future outlook is somehow among the most uncertain in the league. It’s really hard to figure out exactly what they’re trying to build there under the GarPax/Jim Boylen regime.

One thing that has been working for Chicago is the play of rookie Coby White. Over the past 10 games, White is averaging 20/4/4 on 57.3% true-shooting. I don’t want to get into the Jarrett Culver discussion right now, but that feels like a big swing and a miss considering what White has been up to lately.

Anyways, for Minnesota to take care of business tonight, they’ll need to play much the same as they did last night. I’ve given up on them stopping anyone, but they’re going to need to outscore Chicago. With Zach LaVine out, White will have even more free-reign to shoot as much as possible, which should be entertaining.

There aren’t really many other narratives here, considering nearly all the other components of the Jimmy Butler-era are gone, so it’s mostly about just playing the season out in a more-or-less meaningless March game. The Wolves have more players to evaluate, so it isn’t meaningless from that standpoint, but Chicago is basically just playing this last portion of the season out without much other than Coby White’s development to take note of.

One thing I’m bummed about tonight? I was excited to see just how much Zach LaVine hates Jim Boylen. For those of you who haven’t seen, these two do not seem to get along. That would’ve been some fun side action this evening, but I’m just bummed Zach is out in general.

Projected Lineups

Bulls

Tomas Satoransky

Denzel Valentine

Otto Porter, Jr.

Lauri Markannen

Wendell Carter, Jr.

Wolves

D’Angelo Russell

Malik Beasley

Josh Okogie

Juancho Hernangomez

Naz Reid