For the first time in nearly 45 years, the San Antonio Spurs will face the Chicago Bulls more than twice in the same season. The scheduling anomaly comes as a result of the NBA's inaugural In-Season Tournament. After four games of pool play, the Spurs and Bulls are among the 24 teams that failed to advance to the knockout stage of the competition. This next week had been left empty for all teams for this very reason with the In-Season Quarterfinals set to start on Monday.

How the Spurs and Bulls got here

The first of San Antonio's newly scheduled games will come on Wednesday, December 6 at the Minnesota Timberwolves. Their match-up against Chicago happens two nights later on Friday, December 8.

This Spurs draw comes after they failed to win a single game in the Western Conference's Group C. They fell to the Timberwolves 117-110 in San Antonio. Four nights later, they were blown out in Oklahoma City 123-87. Three nights after that came another loss at home, 120-120 to the Sacramento Kings before they wrapped up the competition with a 118-112 loss at the Golden State Warriors.

Like the Spurs, the Bulls went 0-4 in pool play. They competed in the East's Group C.

Three's a Company

The Spurs actually spent their first four NBA seasons in the Eastern Conference. Though Chicago was in the West during that span, the two met four times in each of the 1976-'77 and 1977-'78 seasons. They played three times in 1978-'79. And that would prove the last time they'd get together more than twice in the same season.

Since 1979-'80, they've been originally scheduled to play twice a year. In 1980-'81 the Spurs moved to the Western Conference and the Bulls moved to the East. Since then, there have been three occurrences in which they've played just once during the season – the lockout years of 1999 and 2011-'12, plus 2019-'20 when COVID-19 halted play until the Orlando, Florida bubble.

Following their match-up on December 8, the Spurs and Bulls were already scheduled to meet on December 21 in the Windy City and on January 13 in the Alamo City.

The DeRozan dynamic

Now in his third season with the Bulls, DeMar DeRozan spent the previous three seasons in San Antonio. The headliner on the Spurs' end of the Kawhi Leonard trade in July of 2018, DeRozan hit his scoring averages on the nose while with the Silver and Black. A career 21-points-per-game scorer, the now 34-year-old star averaged 21.2, 22.1, and 21.6 in helping lead the Spurs to the 2019 playoffs and play-in games the next two seasons. The Silver and Black have not returned to the playoffs since '19.

A six-time all-star, DeRozan earned four of those nods in his first nine seasons with the Toronto Raptors. He's made the last two all-star games with Chicago.

Spurs/Bulls draft pick swaps

In trading DeRozan to the Bulls, the Spurs received first and second-round draft selections in 2025. The first-round pick is protected and may not transfer depending on Chicago's draft position that summer. San Antonio also got a 2022 second-round pick which turned into Kennedy Chandler, whom they traded to Memphis.

Quite a number of ties between two teams are thrown into a match-up to fill in the blanks.