Caleb Wilson: The Future of the Chicago Bulls

On an August afternoon outside the United Center, the past and future of the Chicago Bulls stand almost eye to eye.

Fans snake around the atrium for a chance to meet Caleb Wilson, the 20-year-old rookie who hasn’t played a regular-season minute yet but already carries the weight of a restless franchise. Inside, the line for his autograph bends and loops. Outside, he’s screaming into a camera, tongue out, posing for a hype video in front of the Michael Jordan statue.

Jordan in bronze, Wilson in Bulls red. One era immortalized, another only just sketched in. The symbolism is impossible to miss.

The Bulls haven’t mattered much in the standings for the better part of a decade, missing the playoffs in eight of the past nine seasons. They are betting heavily that Wilson, the No. 4 pick out of North Carolina, is the one who changes that. Not overnight, not with shortcuts, but as the centerpiece of a slow, deliberate rebuild.

And yet, he has wasted no time igniting belief.

A Summer League jolt

The noise started in Las Vegas.

In his first professional game at summer league, Wilson detonated for 35 points, the second-highest total ever by a rookie in a summer league debut. He buried seven 3-pointers — more than he hit in his entire freshman season at North Carolina — and looked nothing like the hesitant shooter scouts had nitpicked all spring.

Game two, he went viral. Wilson rose over 6-foot-11 Jonas Aidoo, a Jazz center built to erase that kind of audacity, and hammered home a dunk that instantly joined the summer’s top highlight reels.

By his fourth and final game, Kevin Garnett was sitting courtside, watching a player whose name had already been linked to his own. The physical echoes are obvious: both 6-foot-10, wiry 215-pound forwards with elastic limbs and violent bounce.

Draymond Green went even further on his podcast.

“I actually think his floor is Kevin Garnett,” Green said. “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.”

Teams usually roll their eyes at summer league overreactions. Wilson made that impossible.

“He looks,” one Bulls source told ESPN, “like we got a dude.”

The numbers backed the eye test: 23.5 points, 7.3 rebounds, 1.3 steals and 2.5 blocks across four games, a spot on the all–summer league first team, and that 35-point opener etched into the event’s record book. When staffers told him where his debut ranked historically, Wilson barely blinked.

They lost the game. That’s what bothered him.

Rebuilding the Bulls, from the top down

Wilson arrives as the headline act in a broader overhaul.

Chicago hired Bryson Graham as head of basketball operations, a talent evaluator known for finding young pieces and building patiently through the draft. Graham’s first major decision was to hire Tiago Splitter as head coach, a former big man with a growing reputation for developing players.

From there, the Bulls drafted Wilson at No. 4, then added Dailyn Swain at No. 15. They sprinkled in veterans such as Norman Powell and Nic Claxton to insulate the kids and give the locker room some scars and stories.

Wilson, though, is the priority. The project. The potential star.

“We just want to see internal growth from our young guys and even from our veteran players,” Graham said. “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, expectations for Wilson are enormous. For the team, they’re measured. In a loaded Eastern Conference, there is no mandate for a play-in run, no illusion that this roster is one move away. After years of trying to fast-forward their way back to relevance, the Bulls are finally leaning into patience.

Wilson is not.

“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.”

Fixing the flaw everyone circled

The shot was supposed to be the problem.

At North Carolina, Wilson barely looked at the 3-point line, averaging just 1.1 attempts from deep per game and making fewer 3s all season than he hit in one night in Las Vegas. Scouts questioned whether he could stretch the floor. An injury-shortened year — a broken thumb and fracture in his left wrist that ended his season in February and kept him out of the NCAA tournament — only amplified the doubts.

He heard them. He disagreed with the premise.

Wilson pointed to the Tar Heels’ system, which didn’t ask him to space the floor as a high-volume shooter. Once the season ended, he attacked the weakness head-on.

“I’m glad I didn't shoot 3s in college,” Wilson said this summer. “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.”

Even in a cast, thumb locked straight, he found a way. He couldn’t move the digit, but he could still cradle a ball, still groove the motion. So he did. Over and over. All summer.

Now, he estimates he’s putting up between 2,000 and 2,500 3-pointers a day.

Inside the building, that grind has made as much noise as any dunk.

He cried before his summer league debut — five months to the day after his college season ended — because he had been waiting so long to get back on the floor. When other top picks in his class were shut down after two or three games, Wilson lobbied to keep playing, texting Graham to ask for a spot in the second half of a back-to-back.

The Bulls let him. He refused the easy off-ramp.

Outside of Vegas, he’s barely left Chicago. Mornings at the practice facility, nights back again around 8 or 9 p.m., often with Swain, grinding until close to 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.”

Tiago Splitter’s laboratory

For Graham, the plan was always bigger than one player. It was about who would shape that player.

His first major hire as head of basketball operations was Splitter, whose vision for a team, Graham believed, aligned with his own.

Splitter’s résumé is a patchwork of development wins. In Portland, he stepped in as interim head coach and steered a young Trail Blazers team to a surprise playoff berth as the No. 7 seed in the West. Before that, he’d helped Deni Avdija blossom into an All-Star in Portland, worked with Jarrett Allen in Brooklyn’s player development program in 2019, and helped mold 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 started off the court. Music, mostly.

Splitter found himself surprised by the rookie’s range — hip-hop, classical, country — and by the fact that the 19-year-old had picked up the guitar in his spare time. They talked. They listened. They built something that wasn’t just about pick-and-roll angles or weak-side rotations.

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

On the court, Splitter took the reins of the Bulls’ first two summer league games, wanting to set the tone early. It was a dry run for what awaits in October: a young, hungry roster, a fan base starved for relevance, and a front office that hired him to grow something sustainable.

Wilson liked what he saw.

“He's really detailed,” the rookie 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 even operated as the primary ball handler, functioning as a point forward in a way Garnett never did. That responsibility will ease when the season starts, with Josh Giddey, Powell and third-year forward Matas Buzelis sharing the creation load. Buzelis, who started 77 games last season, will help steady the offense, allowing Wilson to pick his spots.

For Graham, that blend of youth and experience is intentional.

“It builds a healthy environment,” he 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 win in different ways. In France, he led Paris Basketball to the EuroLeague playoffs with a fast-paced attack. With the Blazers, defense became the identity. Chicago is his first chance to sculpt a roster almost from scratch.

“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.”

A new standard in Chicago

The work has already spilled beyond the team facility.

In what has become a Bulls tradition, players gathered in Miami last week for a player-run minicamp ahead of training camp. It’s part chemistry lab, part proving ground, and this year, part early referendum on just how ready Wilson is to lead from the front.

The hype around him keeps rising — from summer league, from the gym stories, from the way he’s embraced the grind of a franchise trying to climb out of the middle. The Bulls, for once, are not chasing a quick fix. They are trying to build a standard.

Wilson sounds like he’s on the same page, even if his own bar remains sky-high.

“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 going anywhere. The question now is whether the kid who screamed beneath it this summer can drag the Bulls toward an era where it finally has company.