CHICAGO — During Tuesday’s loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Josh Guidy stood in front of the scorer’s table, holding a resistance band and a towel between one hand and watching every action on the court.
Just 15 minutes earlier, the defender had barely limped off the pitch. Gidey sprained his ankle on offense, limped across halfcourt and hit a 3-pointer before tiptoeing out of the game. But even with the Bulls trailing by double digits, the guard still insisted on coming back in the final quarter of the eventual loss.
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Coach Billy Donovan cited Guidy’s extensive track record with ankle sprains and strains — including a notable one late last season — as a source of confidence among the medical team in the linebacker’s judgment of his injuries. The Bulls thought Guiddy knew his limits when he sprained his ankle. If a defender says he can return to the game, they will believe him.
“Sometimes the initial shock is worse than it actually is,” Guidy said after the loss. “The initial pain always feels bad, but when I stood up and started walking around, I realized it wasn’t as bad as I first thought.”
Still, the moment felt pointless. Guidy came on as a substitute and fought hard for 5:28 of the game. Despite missing the free throw, he assisted on two field goals, turned the ball over once and scored three points, but Donovan ultimately pulled him back again due to concerns about a hamstring injury that should limit his playing time to around 30 minutes per game (a guideline that coaches are only loosely following).
The Bulls trailed by 16 points when Guiddy entered the game. When he exited, the gap narrowed slightly to 15 points. It was a brief stop in a one-off game. However, this brief passage in the fourth quarter raises a question the Bulls are used to facing this season: Why is he playing? What’s the point in risking another injury? What’s the point?
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The Bulls season is about to end with a whimper, but the Bulls are exactly where they want to be, six games out of the play-in round and ninth in the draft lottery. Still, the Bulls prioritized getting Gidey on the floor over providing running room for a player like Rob Dillingham, who is ostensibly the key piece Chicago needs to analyze as they begin to rethink long-term roster construction. He’s still expected to command minutes as the Bulls’ primary ball-handler as players like Anfernee Simons and Jaden Ivey return to the rotation.
This stubborn insistence on keeping Gidey on the floor reflects confusion about how the team views its starting point guard. The Bulls clearly believe he’s valuable enough to prioritize being the centerpiece of their current roster rebuild. However, the front office was never fully convinced of his true star power, or if they planned to truly build the team around Gidi in the coming seasons.
As the Bulls weigh that dynamic, Tuesday’s game aptly encapsulates the team’s present and future. Like many of his teammates, Guidy views the defending champions as a “benchmark” for the rest of the league to test themselves against. But the game against the Thunder also provided a moment of reflection and comparison of key moments in Giddy’s development in the two years since the Bulls acquired him in a trade from Oklahoma City.
His final season in Oklahoma City defined Guidy’s image throughout the league, but not in the way he wanted. For much of that year, Guiddy felt like a non-factor on offense and a liability on defense.
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When the guard catches the ball on the perimeter, defenders back away, as if daring him to shoot. The team clearly plans to utilize him in the pick-and-roll. Every weakness in his game was more subtly exploited in the playoffs, when he was eventually benched due to poor shooting and weak defense.
“I learned a lot that year and I looked in the mirror a lot and reflected on myself on how I needed to get better as a player,” Guidy said. “My confidence was getting lower and lower that year and I was trying to dig myself out of a hole that was getting deeper and deeper every game.”
In the two years since he left Oklahoma City, Guidy has clearly taken astronomical steps in his NBA career. He averages about 5 points and 4 assists per game for the Bulls. Most notably, Guidy’s shooting from beyond the arc improved by more than 37 percent following his move to Chicago, a critical improvement in establishing his credibility as a true guard threat.
The defender attributes this improvement to his renewed confidence. But that still doesn’t guarantee the most aesthetically pleasing shot. Guidy is the first to admit that he missed two egregious shots in Tuesday’s game, one of which completely missed the rim and fell into the hands of Chet Holmgren, as if he had momentarily forgotten that the big man was no longer his teammate. But these types of mistakes don’t affect Guidy as badly as they did when he was still struggling with the Thunder.
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“I feel like I’m at the point now where I can confidently let it fly,” Guidy said. “Whether it’s 0-for-11 or 11-for-11, I’m going to take a shot like they’re both making it.”
When Guidy looks at the Thunder, the guard said he doesn’t feel any animosity or resentment. They were his friends, his brothers, the guys who saw him through the toughest year of his career, who saw him grow from rookie to starter. He always wanted the Thunder to win. He just wanted to do it with them.
But now, Oklahoma City also means something bigger to Guiddy. This team set the framework for how any struggling team can rebuild its roster from the bottom up. It’s not a simple formula — not every team can draft as much talent as Oklahoma City — but it does give hope to teams like Chicago.
Yet therein lies Gidi’s main problem at this stage of his career. Even with tremendous personal growth, the guard is back on the first rung of the long ladder as another team tries to build with him. There won’t be many wins in Chicago’s future. It might be years before Guiddy sees another chance to redeem himself in the playoffs.
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Giddy understands this reality. He knows his place in the Bulls’ future. But that doesn’t make it any easier to find patience in the short term. But the guards were willing to try anyway.
“They have a winning culture and a winning habit,” Guidy said. “When I was out there, both ends of the scale and where we are now, we were on the outside looking in and it’s the little things that can help get you back to that point. It doesn’t happen overnight. These things take time to build and I believe in the guys in the locker room and the coaches and the guys in this building that we have the ability to make it happen.”