Almost every NBA season, a team starts unexpectedly hot, and the sport’s media rushes into premature questions about title contention. We don’t have to do that. Last year’s Phoenix Suns, for instance, began with a promising 8-1 record, only to go 28-45 over the rest of the year, miss the playoffs, fire their head coach, and blow up their roster. And the Indiana Pacers, who eventually made it all the way to Game 7 of the NBA Finals, started crappily, floundering five games under .500 until December.

Mirages are abundant in early November, when some teams have a strong grasp on who they are, and others don’t; when some of those well-identified teams are enjoying this discrepancy between themselves and their more muddled foes for the moment, but are due for a course correction when the self-knowledge category evens out.

Plenty are wondering if the Chicago Bulls are one of those teams right now—are they thriving in a way both fresh and endurant, or simply enjoying the anomalous conditions of a nascent season, full of teams still waking up? Either way, the 5-1 Bulls are not title contenders, but they do look—so far—a lot better than anyone expected them to at the beginning of 2025-26. The sight of them is less surprising, however, to anyone who watched them finish out 2024-25 and happened to believe the success that they saw. After trading Zach LaVine and reorienting the team around Josh Giddey and Coby White, they finished the year 15-5, showcasing an uptempo offense defined by quick decisions and even quicker shooting triggers.

This fall, there’s been continuity from that lovely coda to an otherwise lost season, but there are also plenty of new things going on. Close followers of head coach Billy Donovan’s career may recognize this dawning Bulls’ synergy amongst leftover players from his work with the 2019-20 Oklahoma City Thunder. That group of random parts turned into something inspiring, with a left-for-dead Chris Paul galvanizing Dennis Schroeder, Danilo Galinari, Steven Adams, and two young future champions: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Lu Dort.

With the unwieldy, high-usage fare of LaVine and DeRozan gone, Donovan is again proving himself exceptional at making the most of a group that came together more as a matter of trade-storm collateral than through genuine basketball vision. This time, Giddey and 15-year center Nikola Vucevic are the ones reminding everybody that they’re still alive, flanked by Tre Jones and Kevin Huerter—both afterthoughts from the LaVine trade—early Sixth Man of The Year contender Ayo Dosunmu, forgotten lottery man Patrick Williams, blunt defensive tool Isaac Okoro, and the one among them with real, tantalizing elite upside: Matas Buzelis.

Buzelis is the most natural beneficiary of Giddey’s galloping pass-first offense; he’s an active cutter, ready always to finish a play with thunder at the rim. But he also looks far more under control as a self-creator in his second season, decelerating into graceful finishes and walking tightropes between defenders as he slashes to the rim with newly advanced ball-handling. The Bulls’ offense is without any proven superstars, and is fundamentally effective as a volume attack: they can keep going, going, and going, and as long as they don’t turn it over—they mostly haven’t, just yet—they’re going to force superstars to bring out their very best to beat them.

Buzelis, one day, might be the man who can change that equation, and elevate the team beyond their current winning-scheme ways. These plucky sorts of squads almost always see talent catch up to them; later in the NBA season, strategies become all but nullified, and Players Must Make Plays. No one’s expecting Buzelis to be that kind of guy this year, or even next, but that he’s already shown enough pop to keep that candle lit is perhaps the most exciting thing happening for Bulls fans right now. If you’re crazed enough to be ambitiously optimistic about a team that won 39, 39, and 40 games in its past three seasons, Buzelis is your thesis, the one who might deliver this team to the same kind of season-to-season regularity, but closer to the finishing number of 50.

If Chicago ends up anywhere near there this season, it’ll have to include the efforts of White, who has yet to play this season. The team’s most gifted and versatile scorer—and its only other tier-one athlete, next to Buzelis—Coby’s been dealing with a bum calf, but should be back by mid-November. He’ll likely insert himself gingerly into a system that’s been humming so much without him, and it won’t be until it’s really winter that we see how it all works with everyone healthy. White will make an already deep group of guards arguably too deep, but it’s been a while since the Bulls dealt with such generous problems, and Donovan has shown a flair for maximizing the team with cascading sequences of short, maximum-effort shifts on the court.

Pace and defensive hustle are keys to that effort, but rebounding is too—along with taking care of the ball despite throwing it around so quickly, the Bulls have controlled the possession-and-position game by owning the glass, with Giddey and Vucevic as the co-chairs of their board. Quietly, Vucevic has been doing this for a while: a top-50 all-time rebounder, he’s likely to finish in the category’s historical top 25 by the time he’s done. Much has been made of the large package Chicago sent to the Orlando Magic to acquire Vucevic in 2021, most of it negative. But the record is beginning to show that his decreased scoring efficiency in Chicago—and downgrade in overall vigor—was a temporary thing, largely a casualty of the misguided LaVine-DeRozan years, in which too many Bulls saw their games sidelined for a bit of marginal heroball spectacle. Should Vucevic keep leading this version of the team to unexpected success, he may change the story of who he’s been as a Bull, as the story of the Bulls, writ large, changes also for the better.