Caleb Wilson: A New Era for the Chicago Bulls

On an August afternoon outside the United Center, the past and the future of the Chicago Bulls stand almost on top of each other.

Fans flood the concourse, wrapping around the atrium for a meet-and-greet with a 20-year-old who hasn’t played an NBA minute but already carries a city’s restless hope. Caleb Wilson, the No. 4 pick in June’s draft, is screaming into a camera, tongue out, framed by the Michael Jordan statue.

The image is jarring. Jordan frozen in bronze mid-flight; Wilson, all limbs and energy, just getting off the ground.

This is how a franchise tries to turn a page.

A new face for a tired franchise

The Bulls have missed the playoffs in eight of the past nine seasons. They’ve cycled through plans, patched together rosters, and chased shortcuts back to relevance. This summer, they chose something else: a reset built around Wilson and an almost entirely new power structure.

Bryson Graham arrived as head of basketball operations with a reputation for finding talent and building patiently. He hired Tiago Splitter as head coach, a former big man whose coaching résumé is lined with player-development success stories. Then he took Wilson at No. 4 and filled in around him with veterans like Norman Powell and Nic Claxton.

Wilson is not a complementary piece in this vision. He is the vision.

"We just want to see internal growth from our young guys and even from our veteran players," Graham told ESPN. "We just want to see a team that's going to go out there, represent this city well, play hard and obviously continue to grow and continue to develop."

Inside the organization, there’s no mandate to chase a play-in spot in a loaded Eastern Conference. Not this year. After a decade of quick fixes, the Bulls are preaching patience.

Wilson isn’t.

"I expect to have Rookie of the Year, honestly," he said. "I'm going to work hard. I'm going to do what it takes. I feel like the team is really good for me and how I envision to play."

Vegas shockwave

The hype didn’t start at Bulls Fest. It exploded in Las Vegas.

In his first professional game at summer league, Wilson dropped 35 points, the second-highest scoring debut for a rookie in the event’s history. He buried seven 3-pointers, a startling number for a player whose college scouting report was built around everything but his jumper.

The next game, he climbed over 6-foot-11 Jazz center Jonas Aidoo and detonated one of the summer’s signature dunks. By his fourth and final outing, Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett sat courtside, curious about the rookie whose name had started drifting into conversations alongside his own.

Both are 6-foot-10. Both wiry, around 215 pounds. Both fueled by elite, twitchy athleticism. The comparisons came fast.

"I actually think his floor is Kevin Garnett," Warriors forward Draymond Green said on his podcast. "And man, if that's your floor, oh my god. Do you know how great KG was? I actually think with Caleb Wilson, Kevin Garnett could be his floor. That's how special I think Caleb Wilson is."

Executives usually roll their eyes at summer league overreactions. Wilson made them pause.

"He looks," one team source told ESPN, "like we got a dude."

He averaged 23.5 points, 7.3 rebounds, 1.3 steals and 2.5 blocks in four games, earning all-summer league first-team honors. When told that his 35-point debut was one of the highest-scoring debuts in the event’s history, he shrugged. The Bulls had lost.

That detail mattered to him more than any headline.

The shot that changed everything

The wildest part of Wilson’s Vegas breakout wasn’t the scoring total. It was how he did it.

Those seven 3-pointers in his debut? That was more than he hit in his entire freshman season at North Carolina.

His shooting had been the biggest question mark on his draft résumé. That, and the injuries. A broken thumb and a fracture in his left wrist ended his college season in February and kept him out of the NCAA tournament. He averaged just 1.1 3-point attempts per game for the Tar Heels, rarely asked to space the floor.

The Bulls looked past that. Wilson wanted to erase it.

"I'm glad I didn't shoot 3s in college," he said after a summer practice. "Because if I did, I wouldn't be here. I don't know where I'd be. I don't think I'd be a Bull."

The cast on his hand kept his thumb straight and immobile. It didn’t stop his mind or his form. He could still cradle a ball and rehearse the motion. So he did. Over and over. All summer.

Since then, Wilson estimates he has been firing between 2,000 and 2,500 3-pointers per day. The volume borders on obsessive. Inside the organization, it’s exactly what they wanted to see.

He cried before his professional debut in Vegas, five months to the day after his college season ended, overwhelmed by how long he’d waited. When other top picks in his class shut down after two or three summer league games, Wilson lobbied to keep playing. He texted Graham to ask to suit up on the second night of a back-to-back for Chicago’s third game.

The answer was yes. The message was louder: this is a player who doesn’t want to be managed; he wants to be unleashed.

Outside of his Vegas stint, Wilson has barely left Chicago since the draft. He works out at the practice facility in the morning, goes home, and comes back around 8 or 9 p.m. for more. Often, he’s joined by fellow first-rounder Dailyn Swain, taken No. 15 in June.

Their sessions stretch toward midnight.

"Everybody highlights his athleticism, which is generational," Swain said. "But he can do a lot of things. He's really good facing up at the elbow, jab. He has a really good midrange shot. He's been knocking down 3s, so he's widening his arsenal."

The Splitter project

Graham’s first major move as the Bulls’ top basketball executive was hiring Splitter. The choice said as much about the franchise’s priorities as the Wilson pick itself.

Last season, Splitter stepped in as interim coach in Portland and helped steer the Trail Blazers to a surprise playoff berth as the No. 7 seed in the West. When he arrived in Chicago, no one rushed to talk about replicating that kind of leap.

Graham instead leaned on Splitter’s track record with young players: helping Deni Avdija blossom into an All-Star in Portland, working with Jarrett Allen in Brooklyn’s player development program in 2019, and guiding a young Alperen Sengun in Houston in 2023.

"The first thing you do is connect," Splitter said. "That's the foundation of everything you do, especially at this level. If you don't have that, it's really hard to demand and make them respect you. The foundation is [to] connect with the players in different ways."

With Wilson, that connection started away from the court. Music, of all things, opened the door. Splitter found himself surprised by the rookie’s range of tastes. Wilson, who began learning guitar this summer, bounces from hip-hop to classical to country without blinking.

"Very interesting young guy," Splitter said. "You see how his brain functions and the variety of things he can have a conversation about."

Then came the basketball.

Splitter coached the Bulls’ first two summer league games, wanting to set the tone and establish a culture with his young core. For a coach still shaping his own identity, this was his laboratory: a young roster, a clean slate, a fan base desperate for something real.

"He's really detailed," Wilson said. "He knows what he wants you to do and he's pretty serious. Most coaches, you have coaches that are joking around and stuff like that. Tiago's pretty serious and he knows what he wants.

"I'd rather have someone who's serious and straightforward with me, so I know what I can do better."

In Vegas, Wilson functioned as the Bulls’ point guard and primary ball handler, a role that never belonged to Garnett in his Hall of Fame career. That responsibility will ease once the regular season starts. Josh Giddey, Powell and third-year forward Matas Buzelis — who started 77 games last season and will help run the offense — will share those duties.

For Graham, surrounding Wilson with grown-ups who’ve already survived the league isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.

"It builds a healthy environment," Graham said. "It gives the younger guys confidence, too, because they know that, when it is going bad, they have some guys that have done it, some guys that have won and had success and they can learn. It's just really important for the overall development of our younger players and the health of our team."

Splitter has shown he can coach in different ways. In France, he led Paris Basketball to the EuroLeague playoffs with a fast-paced, attacking offense. In Portland, defense became his team’s calling card. Chicago is his first chance to mold a young roster from the ground up.

"You have to adapt your system to the players you have," he said. "Yes, I have a vision. I have a certain way I want to play, but you also have to explore what they do best. That's what we're going to do here."

Miami, then the unknown

As they do every year, Bulls players gathered in Miami last week for a player-run minicamp ahead of training camp. Old faces, new faces, a franchise in transition.

Wilson walked into that gym no longer just a prospect, but a centerpiece.

The Bulls are not promising miracles this season. They are promising time, structure and a runway for their young core. The city, worn down by false starts, will decide how much patience it actually has.

Wilson, at least, isn’t thinking small.

"I do expect to win," he said. "Whatever it takes to win is what I'm going to do."

The statue outside the United Center isn’t moving. The question now is how fast the kid standing in its shadow can.