It is an objective fact that Josh Giddey is entering his age-24 season as the 2026-27 NBA season prepares to formally ramp up, with the balance of team media days occurring on Sep 28, 2026.
What is not objective about Giddey is how much upside remains for an NBA player who has accumulated a total of 9,926 regular-season game minutes across his entire five-season NBA career.
Some upside in Giddey’s game may be untapped, while at the same time, what you see is largely what you get night in and night out with Josh Giddey’s NBA game.
Giddey’s third Chicago Bulls season is consequential from a player development standpoint. The Australian guard enters the 2026-27 NBA season with a Bulls front office and coaching staff that have no real allegiance to him or his basketball attributes.
Bulls lead front office executive Bryson Graham has ushered in a basketball philosophy that soon will be verified through real basketball minutes and not just a four-letter acronym.
Ideally, Giddey should be a seamless fit into the Bulls’ braintrust of Graham and head coach Tiago Splitter’s desired offensive philosophy that will center on pace and ball movement. However, what if that isn’t the case?
If it’s works for Anthony Edwards…
An interesting parallel that Giddey should take notice of, as it relates to his continued NBA player development, is a podcast observation that Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch made on his perceived limitations of basketball offenses that revolve heavily around the usage of a single player, such as the famous iterations of the Houston Rockets’ James Harden-led offenses.
Finch’s comments about heliocentric basketball offenses are noteworthy because of his coaching history as a Houston Rockets assistant coach who had a literal front-row seat to James Harden’s evolution into the poster child for helio-ball offense.
Additionally, Finch’s acknowledgement via his current coaching responsibilities with the Minnesota Timberwolves, that he is intentionally moving his superstar guard, Anthony Edwards, away from ball-dominant responsibilities in his offense to operate from his strengths as a scorer is also illuminating.
The application of all of this for Josh Giddey is more of a basketball corollary than a direct basketball comparison.
Josh Giddey is not a high-usage basketball player relative to Rockets James Harden (33.3% usage rate in nine Houston Rockets seasons) or the NBA All-Star version of Anthony Edwards (31.2% usage rate in his NBA All-Star period between 2022 and 2026).
However, Giddey is an above-average usage player in the strictest mathematical sense (a career 23.2% usage rate according to Basketball Reference), considering the maximum team usage rate of 100%, divided among five NBA players, equals a 20% average usage rate.
If an elite NBA coach who has personally witnessed All-NBA-caliber players hit a ceiling with offenses built around their high usage is waving the white flag on this style of play, then that signal should serve as a call to action for Giddey to re-evaluate how he allows himself to be used in an NBA offense.
The evolution in Giddey’s offensive usage for the 2026-27 Chicago Bulls might simply need to be less dribbling, passing, or initiating offense and more finishing offensive possessions by making open threes or, hopefully, arriving at a point where he can attack closeouts on his open three-point attempts.
