Julia Poe of The Chicago Tribune<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cI believe I still can play in the NBA,\u201d Kawamura said following his Summer League debut for Chicago, per Poe. \u201cI want to get a contract \u2014 two-way, whatever. I just want to get a contract.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Second-year Chicago small forward Matas Buzelis, who suited up for the Bulls in a second straight Summer League despite probably having done enough as a rookie to not need the seasoning, raved about what he saw out of the pint-sized point guard.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s the definition of heart over height,\u201d the 6-foot-10 Buzelis said. \u201cHe plays so hard. To be on the floor with him, it means a lot to me. I\u2019m not going to take it for granted because he\u2019s an amazing player and an amazing human.\u201d<\/p>\n
During his five Summer League bouts in Las Vegas, Kawamura notched averages of 10.2 points, 6.2 dimes and 2.2 swipes a night.<\/p>\n
Surprisingly, Kawamura will don the jersey number of a recently departed two-time Chicago All-Star: shooting guard Zach LaVine’s No. 8.<\/p>\n
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LaVine was moved to the Sacramento Kings as part of a multi-team exchange.<\/p>\n
Across seven-and-a-half seasons, the UCLA product averaged 24.2 points on .474\/.390\/.834 shooting splits, 4.7 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 0.9 steals a night. He’s a great isolation scorer and shooter, and a respectable supplemental distributor. But a lackluster defensive effort, injury question marks, and a predilection for ball-stopping have made him a difficult player to build around, as Chicago discovered.<\/p>\n
The team made the playoffs exactly once during LaVine’s tenure, when he was clearly just the second-best player on the club behind six-time All-Star swingman DeMar DeRozan, now also his teammate in Sacramento purgatory.<\/p>\n
Kawamura may not have All-Star upside like LaVine did, but his assumption of LaVine’s jersey at least signifies that Chicago is truly moving on from its failed experiment with the 6-foot-5 swingman.<\/p>\n
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MORE NEWS:<\/strong>NBA insider has theory on Josh Giddey, Bulls contract-talks<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A freshly added Chicago Bulls signing is slated to wear an ex-Bulls All-Star’s old jersey number. Following a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":87800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[58916,960,3127,3128,58917,20510,32695,17461,20512,40045,1260,15402,55490,3143,62,34306,24747,67,132,68,40044,40046,42703],"class_list":{"0":"post-87799","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-adding-kawamura","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-chicago-bulls","11":"tag-cleveland-cavaliers","12":"tag-demar-derozan","13":"tag-isaac-okoro","14":"tag-jersey-number","15":"tag-josh-giddey","16":"tag-lonzo-ball","17":"tag-matas-buzelis","18":"tag-nba","19":"tag-noa-essengue","20":"tag-point-guard","21":"tag-sacramento-kings","22":"tag-sports","23":"tag-summer-league","24":"tag-tre-jones","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-unitedstates","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-windy-city-bulls","29":"tag-yuki-kawamura","30":"tag-zach-lavine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114906480289836245","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}