(Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
“We will not settle for mediocrity,” said Chicago Bulls Vice President of Basketball Operations, Artūras Karnišovas, at his end-of-season press conference, and he has put his money – and assets – where his mouth is. The Bulls have been one of the most active teams in free agency, a continuation from this past season’s trade deadline, with hopes of ending their four-year playoff drought.
The Bulls’ offseason, so far, has played out like this:
Lonzo Ball: 4 years, $85 million
Traded Tomaš Satoransky, Garrett Temple, and a second round pick to New Orleans in a sign-and-trade
Alex Caruso: 4 years, $37 million
DeMar DeRozan: 3 years, $85 million
Traded Thaddeus Young, Al-Farouq Aminu, CHI’s 2025 first round pick (top-10 protected in 2025, top-8 protected in 2026 and 2027), Laker’s 2022 second round pick, and CHI’s 2025 second round pick
Tony Bradley: 1 year, minimum
This is not your average free agency recap article where the moves are graded, the fit of the new players is either questioned or celebrated, and a prediction for next season concludes the piece. There are already numerous articles out there that do exactly that (here is a good one from Kevin O’Connor at The Ringer). Instead, I want to zoom out and talk about what these moves signify for the Bulls, and why this has been a great offseason for them.
It is hard to predict where the Bulls will finish in the East next season, which is why I said I wasn’t going to try, because they have a wide range of outcomes given their roster construction. However, with a fairly solidified top-2 in Brooklyn and Milwaukee and several teams who will be fighting for home-court in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, and New York, it appears that the four or five seed is the best case scenario for the Bulls next season. This has led critics to question whether it was worth going all-in on a roster without a championship ceiling. I am here to tell you that the answer is yes.
The “championship or bust” mindset that many fans have is unproductive and unrealistic. Let's first address the “championship” part of that saying.
Only one team wins the championship every year, and that team almost always has one of the top five or six players in the NBA (along with a couple more All-Stars or borderline All-Stars). A realistic path for the Bulls to acquire one of these players didn’t exist this summer, but I don’t think anyone criticises the Bulls offseason because they didn’t go “all-in” enough.
Many people think that when this is the case for a team, when they are several pieces away from a title, that they should throw in the towel on their current core of players and rebuild, hoping to find a franchise-altering player through the draft.
But that’s exactly what the Bulls did in 2017 when they traded Jimmy Butler. The front office thought, incorrectly in my opinion, that they could not build a championship team around Jimmy Butler, so they traded him to Minnesota and kicked off a brutal rebuild. Launching a rebuild now would just set the Bulls back another four or five years with no guarantee that they will come out the other side with the young core needed to compete in this league.
That brings us to the third option, the path that the Bulls have emphatically chosen with their moves since last trade deadline: building a good team. Somehow that has become a controversial strategy, and I think that is because people want to be able to visualize their team’s road to a potential title. It is easy to do so if your team is already a contender. Teams like the Lakers, Nets, and Bucks know that they will have a great shot at winning a title next year.
Even rebuilding teams can visualize their path to a championship. They know they have to accumulate assets that can turn into All-Star caliber players either from the draft or by trading them. For instance, the Mavs had a short rebuild after Dirk retired which resulted in Luka Doncic, and now the path to a championship is easy to visualize because they know they have the toughest piece to get, the centerpiece of their team, and they just have to build around Luka – which is evidently easier said than done.
A team like the Thunder can also visualize their path to a championship. It involves adding players using high draft picks, a result of poor regular seasons, who could become the centerpiece of their team or trading some of their picks for an already established player to build around. It may not be easy to truly visualize this path, you don’t know what the roster will look like when they are competitive, but at least they know what’s in store for next offseason.
Fans want their team to be committed to a strategy. The Nets are committed to contending for a title and will do whatever it takes to win, such as accumulating a lofty luxury tax bill. The Thunder are committed to rebuilding and will do whatever it takes to acquire assets. But what are the Bulls committed to?
It’s hard to visualize the Bulls path to a championship — if the Bulls finish sixth in the East, what do they do next offseason to take the next step forward — but that doesn’t mean the path doesn’t exist or that their moves this summer were ill-advised. This Bulls team is a playoff team, and it is a lot easier to build a championship team from one that already has a good foundation than from one starting from scratch. Although the Bulls will lack draft picks and cap space, a good front office, which the Bulls finally have, will make that jump from a middling playoff team to a contender significantly more likely.
We have also already seen a monumental shift in the Bulls’ culture since Artūras Karnišovas and Marc Eversley took over. The results have been made evident by the fact that two of the top free agents in this class, Ball and DeRozan, chose to sign with the Bulls, a franchise that has consistently fallen short of signing the top free agents.
(AP Photo)
Another thing the Bulls have that helped bring in Ball and DeRozan is Zach LaVine. Players want to play with him. LaVine has made phenomenal strides as a player, and the Bulls need to take advantage of his prime. Also, with LaVine’s contract coming up soon, the Bulls need to sign him to an extension. Their acquisitions undoubtedly make them a better team, demonstrating to LaVine their desire to win.
Building a playoff team is an important step for the Bulls. Not only does it get them closer to competing and gives fans something to be excited for. When you have watched your team fail for several years in every spectacular way imaginable – from the three alphas dividing the locker room to everything about the Jim Boylen years to drafting seventh three years in a row, missing out on several franchise-altering players – a fun, competitive team seems like a dream. This offseason shows that the Bulls are deviating from their path as an unfailingly entertaining circus that fans hate to love.
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