Caleb Wilson hadn't played a competitive game since his UNC season ended early with a broken wrist back in February. First game back, in Vegas, wearing a Bulls jersey for the first time as the No. 4 overall pick in this year's draft, and he looked like he never missed a beat.
CALEB WILSON CHASEDOWN
That chasedown was just the appetizer. By the time it was over, Wilson had put together one of the best scoring debuts the Las Vegas Summer League has ever seen, and he did it in the exact area scouts spent all spring picking apart.
The biggest knock on Caleb Wilson in the draft process was his three-point shooting. Tonight he dropped 35 (the most ever for a rookie in his Vegas Summer League debut) and shot 7/11 from deep. We got ourselves a ballplayer.
Wilson finished 12-for-21 from the field, went 7-for-11 from three, and piled up 6 rebounds, 3 blocks and 2 steals to go with the 35 points, according to ESPN Research. That's the second-most points ever in a Vegas Summer League debut, trailing only Marco Belinelli's 37 back in 2007 — a near-two-decade-old mark that a guy who'd just come off wrist surgery nearly erased in his first outing.
The three-point shooting was supposed to be the question mark. Wilson averaged nearly 20 points a game at North Carolina but scouts flagged his jumper as the swing skill between star and rotation piece heading into a draft where he still went 4th overall. One night in Vegas and that whole conversation looks premature.
Should Caleb Wilson have gone No. 1 overall?
The Bulls still lost. The Grizzlies escaped with the win, and Wilson's monster line didn't matter enough to get Chicago the result. That's the part that stuck with him postgame — not the 35, not the near-record, the L.
Caleb Wilson didn’t even care that he broke a scoring record because he lost a Summer League game. We’ve got a demon.
That reaction is its own storyline. A rookie having the individual game of his life and looking almost annoyed about it because the box score didn't have a W attached is exactly the kind of competitive streak Bulls fans have been begging for. It's also why BarstoolChief's comparison, half-joking as it was, landed the way it did.
I didn’t know Wilson is a 6’9 Steph curry.
Nobody's actually saying a 6-foot-9 rookie coming off a wrist injury is the next Curry — the man dunked in that clip, not pulled up from 30. But the shooting stroke he flashed in his debut, from a guy whose jumper was the one thing scouts doubted, is why the comparison got made at all. Summer League rolls on, and after a night like that, every Bulls game the rest of the week just became appointment viewing.