Bulls already blasted for Noa Essengue draft pick

The Chicago Bulls used their No. 12 pick in this year's 2025 NBA draft to take a flier on a long-term prospect, French wing Noa Essengue.

The raw 18-year-old is the draft's second-youngest player, just three days older than No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg of the Dallas Mavericks. He's a 6-foot-10 stringbean with a solid motor, but he can't shoot and often has looked utterly lost on defense.

Following a wildly uneven Summer League performance, Chicago is already being called out by pundits — and fans alike — for selecting Essengue.

Alan Goldsher of Fantasy Sports On SI has lambasted the pick from a variety of angles.

"Like Patrick Williams—Chicago’s dumbest first-round draft decision since they traded LaMarcus Aldridge for Tyrus Thomas in 2006 (oy gevalt)—the 18-year-old [Essengue] wasn’t his team’s go-to player in his recent pre-NBA life," writes Goldsher.

Beyond possibly whiffing on the very undercooked Essengue, Chicago appears to have missed out a golden opportunity in the draft.

The Atlanta Hawks, who possessed the rights to the No. 13 selection, accepted a bizarre trade offer from freshly hired New Orleans Pelicans team president Joe Dumars: trading that pick for the rights to the No. 23 selection and, more critically, the Pelicans' unprotected first rounder (the better pick between the Pelicans' and Milwaukee Bucks first round selection) in the 2026 draft.

Per Rod Walker of NOLA.com, Dumars revealed that, after he selected 6-foot-4 Oklahoma combo guard Jeremiah Fears with the No. 7 pick, he was looking to make an additional lottery pick this year.

“When I got here, we had just the seventh pick and I was like ’we don’t have enough assets to move around in the draft,’” Dumars said. “So we had to get that asset. We had to get that asset and put it into this draft and hope that we had a chance to do what we did tonight.”

“We started from nine all the way until we got a deal,” Dumars said. “You don’t pull the trigger on the asset next year until you get that deal. Otherwise, you keep it.”

New Orleans took Maryland big man Derik Queen with the No. 13 pick, but given its mismatched and young-skewing roster, the team seems likely to land right back into the lottery next year... although it will now probably be without a pick in the top 14 (unless the Bucks completely fall apart, too). Chicago should absolutely have taken this offer if it was on the table, and it's a testament to the team's utter incompetence that the Bulls didn't make the move.

Given that the Bulls front office is infamously terrified of adding future draft equity during a rebuild for no discernible reason beyond sheer laziness, the fact that the Bulls could have nabbed a probable bonus lottery pick — in what's supposed to be a loaded 2026 draft — perhaps shouldn't come as a major surprise, but it's still very disappointing nevertheless.

Across three Summer League contests, Essengue has been averaging a meager 12.7 points on .563/.267/.615 shooting splits, 5.3 rebounds, 1.3 steals, 0.7 blocks and 0.7 assists. Queen, meanwhile, 

"He’ll spend his entire rookie season bopping back and forth between the G-League Windy City Bulls and Windy City mothership," predicts Goldsher. "He’ll finish 2025-26 with low-single-digit averages in every major offensive category."

The 6-foot-9 Queen, meanwhile, has been a double-double machine in his three Summer League games thus far, averaging 14 points, 11 rebounds, 2.3 dimes, 1 block and 0.7 steals a night.