With less than a week remaining in the 2025-26 season, the Chicago Bulls fired Artūras Karnišovas and Marc Eversley on Monday, their two leading basketball decision-makers in the front office.
“We have not had the success our fans deserve, and it’s my responsibility to go in a new direction,” Bulls CEO Michael Reinsdorf said, in part, in a statement. “This move is about positioning our team for sustained success moving ahead.”
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In six seasons under Karnišovas, the team’s executive vice president of basketball operations, and Eversley, their general manager, the Bulls had one winning season and won just a single playoff game. The Bulls still manage to pack the cavernous United Center most nights, but fan unrest has clearly reached Reinsdorf and his father Jerry, who owns the team.
When Chicago’s season officially concludes on April 12, it’ll mark the fourth consecutive season without a playoff appearance, and the first in three years without so much as a Play-In tournament berth.
The firing of Karnišovas and Eversley comes one week after the team waived Jaden Ivey after a series of Instagram livestreams in which he made inflammatory comments based on his religious beliefs and criticized the NBA’s advocacy of the LGBTQ+ community. Karnišovas acquired the former Detroit Pistons guard at the February trade deadline.
At the time, Ivey, a top-five pick in 2022, fit the timeline Karnišovas’ operation sketched, and followed a trend of refurbished former lottery talent that the Bulls herded in recent years. His acquisition was part of an uncharacteristically active Bulls trade deadline, in which Karnišovas’ front office made seven deals to turn over a core that included Bulls mainstays Coby White, Ayo Dosunmu and Nikola Vučević.
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Karnišovas’ trade-deadline moves, meant to salvage some future assets while improving Chicago’s lottery odds among a sea of tanking teams, increasingly placed him at odds with Billy Donovan. Blindly playing young, inexperienced talent has never been Donovan’s preference. The Bulls’ head coach continued to use his new, younger group the same way he would if the team was in contention, playing veterans like Collin Sexton heavy minutes, including late-game scenarios.
Donovan’s future with the Bulls remains uncertain. He was a candidate to fill the vacancy at the University of North Carolina before the school hired former Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone.
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The Bulls hired Karnišovas after the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to replace longtime head of basketball operations John Paxson and his GM, Gar Forman. Karnišovas soon hired Eversley, who was the first Black GM in Bulls history. Their first big moves were hiring Donovan to replace Jim Boylen as head coach and then trading Wendell Carter Jr. and what would become two first-round picks for Vučević. Their first draft pick was Patrick Williams at No. 4, whom they later extended in a five-year, $90 million deal despite middling performance.
In the summer of 2021, Karnišovas made a splash in free agency, which was rare for the Bulls, when the team signed Alex Caruso and Lonzo Ball while acquiring DeMar DeRozan in a sign-and-trade with the Spurs. But despite limited success, he then didn’t make a trade involving a player for nearly three years, when he traded Caruso to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Josh Giddey.
Karnišovas has since made a flurry of trades, shipping out impact players like Zach LaVine, Ball, White, Dosunmu, Vučević and more, while failing to acquire a first-round draft pick in return in any of those deals. Karnišovas’ group, in fact, lost one of the second-round picks it had acquired when White failed his physical with the Charlotte Hornets.
The new general manager could inherit two first-round draft picks and more than $60 million in cap space this summer to begin remaking the team.
“I want our fans to know that I hear you and understand your frustration,” Michael Reinsdorf said in a statement. “I feel it as well. I know this will take time, and I am fully committed to getting this right. At the Chicago Bulls, our focus remains on building a team that can compete at the highest level and ultimately contend for championships. We are committed to taking the necessary steps to move the Bulls forward in a way that makes our fans proud.”
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The Bulls haven’t won a playoff series since 2015, which was also Tom Thibodeau’s last season in charge. Chicago fired him after falling to LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers 4-2 in the second round with Forman noting the Bulls “had some success” with Thibodeau, but needed change to improve.
In the 11 seasons since then, the team has had three head coaches and is 378-493 with two playoff appearances.