Chicago Bulls rookie Caleb Wilson plans to keep his pregame ritual simple, even in the NBA.
Hit an early morning workout at shootaround. Come home. Eat, sleep. Wake up, meditate. And then, before he heads to the arena, Wilson will take a moment to watch his own highlights.
It’s a practice in recognition. Wilson is driven by a deep inner faith — in his talent, in his work ethic, in the path he patiently trod to arrive at the first night of his NBA career. But that faith needs to be tended.
Wilson pours into this self-belief constantly and purposefully through visualization practices and a constant stream of positive self-talk. When in doubt, the best way to remind himself of what he can do is to watch what he already has done.
Wilson doesn’t keep a folder of his mixtapes saved on his phone. He looks up his highlights the same way as anyone else — by opening YouTube, searching his name and picking the top result.
The morning before his NBA debut, the first video available was a mix created by the league’s official channel showing Wilson’s best dunks and 3-pointers from the Bulls’ five preseason games. Sometimes he scrolls a little farther to find the mixes from his high school days, his hair tied on top of his head as he crushes dunks through the rim.
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Watching the past makes Wilson even more eager to begin building his future. And after a lengthy summer of anticipation, the No. 4 draft pick will start to take on that opportunity in Wednesday night’s season opener against the Toronto Raptors at Scotiabank Arena (6:30 p.m., CHSN).
“I feel like I prepared for the moment,” Wilson said. “It’s time to get out there and show what I can do.”
A debut carries extra weight for a lottery pick such as Wilson. There are expectations and then there are the lofty dreams of a city that has been starved for a star for a decade. Before he ever played one second in a Bulls jersey, Wilson already had been dubbed the franchise’s next great hope.
He doesn’t shy away from this. He promises greatness. He welcomes comparison with the best of the best.
On Wilson’s first day in Chicago, a team photographer captured a shot of the rookie in the United Center atrium, gazing up at the Michael Jordan statue, eyes focused and hands clasped behind his back in pensive thought. Wilson posted it to his Instagram story with a two-word caption: “One goal.”
First-year Bulls coach Tiago Splitter doesn’t want to add to that pressure. He needs Wilson to learn his system, to embrace the defensive principles that will allow the Bulls to compete on the margins this season. But he’s not worried about giving Wilson extra motivation — especially before his debut.
“Caleb has a ton of things on his mind right now — first NBA game, how we play on offense, how we play on defense,” Splitter said. “There’s a lot of things going on. And sometimes you’ve got to relax a little bit and just go out there and hoop. Slowly, he’s going to get those things better, but I just want to see him enjoying and competing.”
This level-headed perspective is a necessity for a rookie with a ceiling this high — and this far away. Wilson did not overwhelm in the preseason. At times, he showed an exhilarating capacity for off-ball movement and finishing at the rim. In other moments, he got completely lost in the shuffle on defense, whipping his head back and forth while attempting to twist and wrench his body through traffic to stay on his man.
His primary goal for the first two weeks of the season is to learn how to play NBA-caliber defense. The Bulls need Wilson to pick up that lesson quickly as they start the season without center Nic Claxton, who was acquired over the summer to handle the bulk of the team’s rim-protection responsibilities.
Without Claxton for the next two weeks, the Bulls will face a series of significant rim threats from such teams as the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks. That gauntlet starts Wednesday in Toronto with Kawhi Leonard and Scottie Barnes, two jumbo-sized opponents who will stretch Wilson’s abilities from the opening whistle.
Wilson isn’t taking this matchup lightly. He modeled his game off Leonard as a kid and carefully studied Barnes’ progression as a roadmap for his own NBA journey. But he also has embraced the inevitability of his mistakes.
“You’ve got to give yourself grace,” Wilson said. “I don’t know what the timetable is on me being an All-Star or all that stuff, but I feel like every day I’ll come out and be better than I was the day before. I feel like I’ve grown so much as a player just in the past week, so there’s no telling what I’ll look like come January.
“I know that this is going to happen and I can’t give anyone a timetable, even myself, because I feel like expectations lead to disappointment most of the time. I’ll just go out there and approach every day with the best of my God-sent ability, and I know the results will come.”