CHICAGO — Early in the fourth quarter of Tuesday’s loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Josh Giddey stood at the scorer’s table with a resistance band and a towel tucked into one hand, his eyes tracking every movement on the court.

Barely 15 minutes before, the guard could barely hobble off the court. Giddey turned his ankle on an offensive play, limping his way through the half court and lining up a 3-point attempt before gingerly exiting the game. But even with the Bulls trailing by double digits, the guard insisted on returning for the final quarter of the eventual loss.

Coach Billy Donovan cited Giddey’s extensive record with ankle tweaks and strains — including a notable one at the end of last season — as a source of confidence for the medical team in the guard’s discretion regarding his own injuries. The Bulls feel that Giddey knows his limits when he rolls an ankle. If the guard said he’s OK to go back into a game, they believe him.

“Sometimes the initial shock is worse than it actually is,” Giddey said after the loss. “The initial pain always feels bad, but when I got up and started moving around, I realized it wasn’t as bad as I originally thought.”

Still, the moment felt pointless. Giddey subbed back in and muscled his way through five minutes and 28 seconds of play. He assisted a pair of shots, turned the ball over once and scored three points despite missing a free throw before Donovan finally pulled him again out of concern for a lingering hamstring injury, which is supposed to limit him to around 30 minutes per game (a guideline the coach only loosely follows).

The Bulls were trailing by 16 points when Giddey checked in. That deficit was diminished slightly to 15 points when he exited. It was a short stint in a throwaway game. Yet this brief passage in the fourth quarter raised the kind of questions the Bulls are used to facing this season: Why is he playing? What’s the point of risking another injury? What is the point of any of this?

The season is cruising to end on a whimper for the Bulls, who are exactly where they want to be, sitting six games out of the play-in tournament and ninth overall in the draft lottery standings. Still, the Bulls prioritize playing Giddey over giving runway to players like Rob Dillingham, who is ostensibly a crucial piece for Chicago to analyze as they begin to rethink their roster construction in the long-term. And when players like Anfernee Simons and Jaden Ivey return to the rotation, he is still expected to dominate minutes in his role as the primary ball handler for the Bulls.

This stubborn insistence upon playing Giddey reflects the confusion of the team’s outlook on their starting point guard. The Bulls clearly believe he is valuable enough to prioritize as a centerpiece for their current roster rebuild. Yet the front office has never been fully sold on his actual star power — or whether they plan to truly build around Giddey in future seasons.

As the Bulls weigh this dynamic, Tuesday’s game was a fitting encapsulation of the present and future for the franchise. Like many of his teammates, Giddey cited the reigning champs as a “benchmark” for the rest of the league to test themselves against. But games against the Thunder also provide crucial moments of reflection and comparison of Giddey’s growth in the two years since the Bulls traded to acquire him from Oklahoma City.

That final season in Oklahoma City defined how Giddey was seen throughout the league — and not in the way he wanted. For most of that year, Giddey felt like a non-factor on offense and a liability on defense.

When the guard caught a ball on the perimeter, defenders backed up as if they were daring him to shoot. Teams clearly schemed to exploit him in the pick-and-roll. And every weakness in his game was picked apart even more shrewdly in the postseason, when he was ultimately benched due to poor shooting and weak defense.

“It was a lot of learning that year, a lot of looking in the mirror and self-reflecting about how I needed to get better as a player,” Giddey said. “That year, my confidence just kept getting lower and lower and I was trying to dig myself out of a hole that was getting deeper every game.”

Giddey clearly took an astronomic step forward in his NBA career in the two years since he left Oklahoma City. He is averaging roughly five points and four assists per game more for the Bulls. Most noticeably, Giddey’s shooting accuracy rose above 37% from behind the arc with his move to Chicago, a crucial improvement to establish his credibility as a true guard threat.

The guard credits this area of improvement to his regained confidence. That still doesn’t guarantee the most aesthetic shooting. Giddey was the first to admit that he missed badly twice in Tuesday’s game, with one 3-point shot avoiding the rim entirely and falling into the hands of Chet Holmgren as if he had momentarily forgotten that the big man wasn’t still his teammate. But those types of mistakes don’t hang on Giddey with the same weight as when he was still floundering with the Thunder.

“I feel like I’ve gotten to a point now where I let it fly with confidence,” Giddey said. “Whether I go 0 for 11 or 11 for 11, I’m shooting the next one like they’ve all gone in.”

When Giddey looks at the Thunder, the guard said he doesn’t feel animosity or resentment. Those are his friends, his brothers, the people who saw him through the hardest year of his career, who watched him develop from a rookie to a starter. He always wanted the Thunder to win. He just wanted to do it with them.

But now, Oklahoma City also represents something bigger to Giddey. This is a team that laid the framework for how any struggling franchise can rebuild its roster from the bottom up. It’s not an easy formula — not every team can draft talent quite like Oklahoma City — but it does provide hope to teams like Chicago.

Yet herein lies the main problem with this stage of Giddey’s career. Even amid great personal growth, the guard is back on the first rung of a lengthy ladder as yet another team tries to build with him. There isn’t much winning ahead for Chicago. It could be years before Giddey sees another opportunity to redeem himself in the postseason.

Giddey understands this reality. He knows his place in the Bulls’ future. That doesn’t make it any easier to find patience in the short-term. But the guard is willing to try regardless.

“They’ve got a winning culture and they build winning habits,” Giddey said. “Being at both ends of the scale when I was there, being where we’re at now — we’re on the outside looking in — it’s the little things that help you get back to that point. It doesn’t happen overnight. These things take time to build and I believe in the guys in this locker room and the coaches and the people in this building that we have the ability to get there.”

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