Bulls guard Jaden Ivey will miss at least the next two weeks with left knee soreness, the team announced Saturday.
The news comes two days after he was healthy and active against the Toronto Raptors but did not play. And though interim coach Wes Unseld called it a “basketball decision,” Ivey explained in his postgame remarks that the noticeable lack of explosion could be a product of soreness in his knee.
Billy Donovan, who returned to the team following the death of his father earlier in the week, said Ivey had his knee checked out by a doctor and will be reevaluated in two weeks.
In four games since being acquired from the Detroit Pistons at the trade deadline, Ivey scored 11.5 points in 28.8 minutes per game, shooting 41.7 percent from the field. His jumper has looked solid, but he completely lacked the explosive first step that made him a top pick in his draft class.
“He started to get more minutes in the first few games,” Donovan said, “his minutes were in the 30s, and you could just see he wasn’t stopping and starting. He didn’t have that explosiveness that I felt like you saw when you watched him play. But again, he was cleared to play, and he played, obviously, minutes in Detroit.
“But he did not come in necessarily complaining about any knee soreness, that had just started to come up a little bit as he communicated with the medical guys. So I think as they try to do some testing on him and then get it looked at, it was just more that they feel right now, they’ve got to get him a lot stronger.”
It has been a challenging road for Ivey over the last year. Last January, Ivey suffered a broken fibula and underwent season-ending surgery. Ahead of the 2025-26 season, Ivey had an arthroscopic procedure that cost him the first 15 games of this season.
Ahead of the Bulls’ 126-110 loss to the Detroit Pistons on Saturday night, head coach JB Bickerstaff offered some perspective, having spent a year plus with the Bulls’ new combo guard.
“He’s had a difficult go of it,” Bickerstaff said. “When he was with us, he was playing at an extremely high level early on. Andthe one play happens where he gets injured on it, and then he was put in a difficult situation from there. Being able to come back from that type of injury isn’t easy. Having to do it in a situation where a team had established itself in a different way, and now you’re trying to find your rhythm with not trying to step on anybody’s toes.
“Then the injury happens at the beginning of this year, that kind of sets him back. So he wasn’t in an easy situation, but I thought he handled it extremely well from team standpoint, an individual standpoint. But I think a fresh opportunity for him will be good.”
Ivey played his first four games with the Bulls following the February 5 trade deadline, but didn’t look like himself. And while he hasn’t looked like his pre-fibula injury self all season, it’s unclear whether he’s degraded even further since leaving Detroit.
“Even after the game against Toronto, it was our decision as a staff,” Donovan said. “But we did bring up to the medical. I think the medical guys felt too, after the first four games, he’s not moving great. And then I think that’s when we started to maybe talk to him a little bit. Not me, but the medical guys. And I think he started to say that he was having some knee soreness. And some of the knee soreness, I think, is coming from lack of strength.”
The Bulls will now use the next few weeks to build him back up, with the idea that adding strength to the surrounding muscles may alleviate the soreness and help him recover some of his explosivity.
“As they tested his strength, there was some weakness there in the muscles,” Donovan said. “And then what happens is, when there is a weakness there, you’re going to end up getting some knee soreness. So it’s just a matter of him having to build back up that leg.
“He was able to play on it, but you always get a little bit worried when a guy potentially has weakness there and he’s not able to start and stop as well. It could lead to something bigger and become a bigger problem. So the idea of shutting him down and trying to work on his strength is something to try to build him back up, where, one, he can play better, and two, he feels better because I don’t think he feels great.”
In the unlikely event that Ivey is ready to go at the end of his re-evaluation period, he will have missed eight games, including his DNP on Thursday. That will leave the Bulls with 19 games to evaluate his potential fit with the team long-term as they navigate their summer plans.
“We expected a full recovery, but the timing we didn’t know,” Bickerstaff said. “Then, the part of it for him, believing it and trusting it, right? That happens with injury too, especially when you’re that explosive and your athleticism is so unique, you got to find that trust back in it. So it’s one of those things that we expected it to be a full recovery, but you just never know a timeline on those things.”
Whether he makes a return this season or next, the Bulls, like the Pistons, are confident he will make a return to his former self.
“I think that there’s a there’s a feeling that if you can get some more strength back, that he can get back, certainly, to where he was athletically,” Donovan said.
