The Chicago Bulls moved on from their front office of executive vice president Arturas Karnišovas and general manager Marc Eversley on Monday, firing them with just days left in the regular season while they try to rebuild one of the league’s least talented rosters.
Our staff has already recounted the various individual moves that hastened the duo’s departure; certainly, there were plenty to choose from. However, virtually any organization will rack up a series of moves that didn’t work out if they’re in control for long enough. Nobody bats 1.000 in this business for long.
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Focusing on mistakes such as Patrick Williams’ contract or the Nikola Vučević trade is accurate to an extent, but it completely glosses over the real problem that vexed the Bulls. I want to hone in on it more, because it bedevils other organizations, too.
If you look at Karnišovas’ tenure in Chicago — and the overarching ethos of the franchise that stretches further into the past and seems likely to stretch further into the future — there’s a different big-picture takeaway that emerges: the need for honesty.
I don’t mean honesty in the sense that they were lying or untruthful to others. I mean that they weren’t honest with themselves. This is the constant thread: The Chicago Bulls, as an organization, have lacked the ability to look in the mirror and accurately describe what is looking back. That has been the fundamental problem dragging down the franchise for the last dozen years.
We can lose the forest for the trees when we just focus on “Karnišovas traded player X for player Y.” The primary issue isn’t that the Bulls traded Wendell Carter Jr. and the pick that became Franz Wagner to Orlando for Vučević, as awful as that trade was. No, the real issue is that the Bulls made that kind of over-the-top, future-for-present trade while they were in the midst of finishing 11th in the Eastern Conference with a team whose best player was Zach LaVine.
How on earth did they think that any amount of pushing chips in was going to get that roster to contending status right away? Because they weren’t honest with themselves that they weren’t good enough to pursue those types of moves.
That fundamental error hurt so much because there was actual talent on the Bulls team Karnišovas inherited in the spring of 2020 and a pathway toward success, but it involved an honest assessment about where the team stood and how long the talent needed to incubate. The Bulls entered 2020-21 with LaVine, Carter, Lauri Markkanen, Daniel Gafford, Luke Kornet, Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu, which was a great pick by the new regime. Even after blowing the Williams pick, Chicago had an obvious pathway toward biding its time in the bottom half of the standings for another year or two and building organically.
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Rushing into it with trades for DeMar DeRozan, Vučević and Lonzo Ball, plus what we must admit was the brilliant signing of Caruso, gave the Bulls the sugar high of the first half of the 2021-22 season, when Chicago briefly was atop the East standings. But the Bulls landed 46-36 and lost in the first round in five games.
Building that roster cost them Markkanen, Gafford, Carter, Kornet and the pick that became Wagner, and there was no realistic expectation that this was a conference-finals-capable roster even if Ball had stayed healthy; the Bulls ended up getting outscored on the season.
That wasn’t the only time the Bulls weren’t truthful with themselves about where they stood. They had an entire Olympiad between then and now to get themselves out of the hole they’d dug, but instead they kept excavating.
It might have been defensible, having already taken the first step down this path, to ride it out for another year in 2022-23 while they waited on Ball’s health and tried to hold it together, especially since they owed their pick to Orlando.
However, the key players aged, important contracts expired … and Chicago just never pivoted. The Bulls didn’t get a first-round pick back for any of the seven best players from that 2021-22 team. Perhaps worse, however, was that they also never fell far enough back into the standings to have a realistic chance of a high lottery pick who could push them forward out of their Play-In Tournament hell. With generational talent available in the 2023 and 2025 drafts, this was a massive missed opportunity: Chicago traded its 2023 pick for Vučević and selected 12th in 2025.
Again, they weren’t honest with themselves. By the 2024 trade deadline, at the absolute latest, it should have been obvious to the Bulls that they needed a full teardown. Instead, they plowed ahead, inexplicably re-signing both Vučević and Williams in free agency in the summer of 2024. That also indirectly cost them a juicy, unprotected 2031 pick swap with the Sacramento Kings in the subsequent LaVine trade because the Bulls no longer had room to take on Harrison Barnes, who is a better player than Williams.
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The quintessential move of the era, however, came at the 2025 trade deadline when they finally got around to trading LaVine. Even at this late hour, the Bulls still could have received a legitimate first-round pick in the deal but opted instead to merely have the Spurs give them back the top-10 protected pick they had already sent out for DeRozan. The Bulls were in position to keep that pick without any help via a light splash of tanking but prioritized chasing the Play-In.
Rather than jet backward to give themselves a better shot at Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, Kon Knueppel or VJ Edgecombe, the Bulls took the opposite approach: Chicago finished 15-5 to rally into the Play-In, got exactly one postseason game out of it and picked 12th. Yay?
After all of that, the Bulls finally pivoted to more of a true rebuild at the 2026 trade deadline …. right after eight other teams had already stolen a march on them and prevented Chicago from having better odds of a top-four pick in a loaded draft. Had the Bulls been more honest with themselves, they would have spun off their vets in the summer and tanked the whole season. Instead, they’ll likely go into the lottery with just 20.5 percent odds of a top-four pick. Their most likely endpoint is picking ninth in a draft that looks really strong Nos. 1 through 8.
I worry this honesty issue is a problem at the ownership level, in which case, changing GMs will have a limited impact.
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Right now, the Bulls’ main strategy appears to be bending over backward to keep coach Billy Donovan, somebody who most observers would regard as a solid, competent head coach but not one whom many would rank among the top five or 10 in the league. Are the Bulls being honest with themselves about whether this is a sensible way to move forward?
Whomever Chicago hires next in the front office almost immediately has to make multiple important decisions that need to go right. The Bulls will have as much salary-cap room as any team in the league — at least $60 million — but that much cash burning a hole in their pocket could be disastrous in the wrong hands. Does it even make sense for Chicago to chase free agents with this roster? Let’s be honest, for once: They should probably use most of it taking on salary dumps and loading up on draft picks. The Bulls will also have the aforementioned lottery pick and perhaps the 15th pick in the draft from Portland if the Blazers make the playoffs.
It’s a blank slate, at least. Chicago has a clean cap sheet aside from Williams (is it too early to scheme ways to make sure he gets picked in the expansion draft?), no tentpole star and only two players — Josh Giddey and Matas Buzelis — who are both young enough and good enough to be considered core parts of whatever comes next.
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The question isn’t about what individual moves come next, however. The question is in the mirror. What do the Bulls see when they look at themselves, and are they honest enough to acknowledge the reality, warts and all? This is the undoing that trips up countless NBA teams and threatens to continue undermining the Bulls, regardless of whom they put in charge of basketball decisions.