Woooo! So unbelievably happy AK is finally gone. It was long overdue.
Michael Reinsdorf’s statement wasn’t anything too noteworthy. I did find it interesting that he mentioned the fans multiple times. That tells me season ticket renewals are down.
Obviously, optimism can only go so far, because it’s still the Reinsdorfs in charge. But I agree with Ricky when he said that it can’t get worse than AK.
It would have seemed difficult to be worse than GarPax, but AKME were just as bad if not worse, and at least GarPax had some success through 2011 (when they drafted Jimmy) before everything went to sh*t. Good riddance!
I mean objectively it's not "clearly" worse when you look at how the GarPax era ended. I think it's just two different flavors of extremely awful.
Obviously, the Pax (and then GarPax) era did give us some pretty high "highs" that were never experienced under AKME.
But looking at the last 5 seasons of the GarPax era, our two coaches were Hoiberg and Boylen. Our results:
2016: 42-40 (missed playoffs)
2017: 41-41 (1st round playoff exit)
2018: 27-55
2019: 22-60
2020 22-43
Despite some good draft positioning, our draft picks during that era were Denzel Valentine, Paul Zipser, Lauri Markkanen (Jimmy trade), Jordan Bell (cash considerations!), Wendell Carter Jr., Chandler Hutchison, Coby White, and Daniel Gafford. Maybe not the WORST group imaginable, but quite uninspiring. And more damning, the Bulls traded Jimmy Butler and spent the next few years trying to build a championship team around Lauri and Zach LaVine.
The last 5 seasons of AKME, until the past 2 months, never sunk as low as those last punishingly awful GarPax years (when the Bulls weren't really even committing to tanking). AKME only had one brief fleeting couple of months of "success", and used that as an excuse NOT to tank -- which is unforgivable. But as much as AKME kept us in NBA Hell, at least for casual fans it was a hell that involved 40ish wins and sniffing the playoffs. GarPax was NBA hell with losing and ineffective wishy-washy quasi-tanking.
But please don't misunderstand my point or think I have anything but bitter contempt for AKME. Just trying to help everyone remember how brutal life was under GarPax.
Well, I'm including the Pax era in GarPax. Sure, if you shave off the good parts of that era than it can go toe-to-toe with AKME. But the good part of the AKME era lasted a few months.
it's all depressing because you look at the results and Lauri, Coby, and WCJ better than all but one AK draft pick (Matas). Even while they were hiring bad coaches and royally screwing up acquiring veterans, Pax still had a better eye for draft talent
Even throwing out the DRose lottery luck, Pax or GarPax drafted Butler, Noah, Deng. All three of those guys rank in the top ten of Bulls career win shares (despite only one of them making it to age 30 on the team).
I mean they didn't technically draft Deng, but it was a draft day trade, so I assume they were making the pick.
With Billy not getting the UNC job, my prediction is he moves into a front office position. Don't know if he'll be good at it, but he can't be worse than AKME.
It might not have been "not getting the UNC job" but "Bulls management convincing Billy not to take UNC job by promising him a GM/Exec role and UNC pivoting to their 2nd choice." I guess we'll see when more details come out.
It seems like he essentially took himself out of the running by deciding to finish the season as the Bulls' coach. It was going to be too many days into the transfer window.
To be fair, when Pax cared he did some pretty good things with the Bulls and (while lottery luck with DRose played a big factor) they were within a Deng injury and multiple Rose injuries from probably playing in an NBA Finals and maybe winning a ring. Once Gar took over I think Pax just started mailing it in.
I might need to do some actual research but I’m pretty sure 90% of Paxson’s success can be attributed to being able to fleece Isiah Thomas, and getting incredibly lucky in the 2008 draft.
he did draft decently. he drafted very safely, but it turned out to be a good strategy. Gar's grit study maybe did have something to do with Taj and Jimmy?
Connelly and Polk were hired by Arturas. Connelly has a much more accomplished brother. Polk is the cap guy, though they screwed up the Lonzo-Okoro trade from a trade exception perspective he did not go over the luxury tax which I think is all the cap math Reinsdorf cares about.
I want the Bulls to cut ties with Donovan too, just burn it all to the ground and start fresh. Some Bulls YouTubers have made the argument that Donovan wouldn’t be interested in being an executive. Which I guess is a separate issue from whether or not ownership will try to promote him into that role, but still I hope Donovan’s out of here at season’s end. I’ve heard Masai Ujiri and Bob Myers are available. Myers would be my pick.
I think Donovan's probably got a better chance than most because he has some independent gravitas that commands some respect from the Reinsdorfs.
That is something AK didn't have. So if he went to Reinsdorf and said, "Hey, our FO is like 20 years out of date. We need to add 5 development guys and 10 more scouts and a whole analytics team", Reinsdorf would have given him like a third of that, and then made AK lay a couple of them off without replacing them over the next couple years. In fact this is pretty much what happened. Although I doubt AK even had the temerity to ask for everything needed.
I think it's possible (but not certain) that Donovan would have the pull to ask for something like that get it. Most importantly, I think he probably has other options. He could always leave, and it'd be embarrasing if he just up and left. And I don't think Donovan is the sort of guy who half-asses stuff. He's plugged into the league and knows how things work, and probably would want to hire guys he thinks will make him look good.
For those reasons, I think he's got a better chance of working out than the average "promoted assisstant GM" that isn't going to have the clout to push for doing things the right way.
I have no idea how he'd do with talent evaluation and whatnot, but that'd be moderated by putting an actual system in place.
very good point. While Donovan would be a first-timer at this job, he does have that kind of respect in basketball circles. If 'constrained' by ownership, he's not going to wait 6 years and whine after he's fired like AKME is trying to do.
I am trying to recall the start of their tenure. He was hired in April 2020 and took until March of the following year to do anything except draft Patrick Williams. His excuses for doing nothing sounded insane ("we want to see what we have") and, with the benefit of hindsight, were insane. In league scouting exists idiot.
When it came time to actually take action, it was the Vuc trade, which may be a top 5 worst trade of the decade. He signed DeRozan and we had our "big three". You could squint at DeMar and see a winning player but Zach and Vuc were always empty calories.
I recall these things because, at the time, I was trying not to be a hater. Maybe it was just the culture at the time but this was apparently something you did not want to be. And, god help me, I actually pretended to be optimistic about these moves. Thank god they took down the old site and those posts have not survived. The lesson is never stop hating. Never.
Holy shit. I totally forgot what he was dragging his feet about. It was freakin' Boylen. How did we ever think this guy was anything other than a dope? Were we ever so naive?
His second off-season was actually pretty great. DeMar played at an all-nba level. Caruso for the MLE was a steal. Lonzo was the perfect fit we needed to make it all work. Of course, then it turned out the whole team depended on Lonzo's knee
It was okay. He got caught tampering in the Lonzo deal, cost the team an asset and failed to build any meaningful depth at the PG position to withstand the loss of Lonzo. He failed to make any moves to replace him at that deadline or in the offseason.
Looking back, our only real reason for hope in AK was that the Nuggets had gotten good and AK got credit for drafting their ascending star in the 2nd round.
But I just checked again and Nikola Jokic was picked at #41 after being projected to be taken in the mid-30s to low-40s. So AK could have turned on "auto-draft mode" and the Nugs probably would have taken him as near-consensus top player available. And AK turned that into a 6-year reign as top basketball executive at one of the league's premier franchises!
yeah a key thing is that if the nuggets had any idea how good Jokic could be, they would have taken him earlier and not risked giving every team a shot and a couple 2 shots at him.
Me the day they fired GarPax: "I'm so thrilled and relieved, this is one of the best days to be a Bulls Fan in a long time -- whatever happens next, it certainly can't be any worse!"
Me, today: "I'm so thrilled and relieved, this is one of the best days to be a Bulls Fan in a long time -- whatever happens next, it certainly can't be any worse!"
Last time Reinsdorf brought in a GM who won a championship, that guy had experienced most of his moderate career success as a baseball scout. So, ladies and gentleman, please welcome your next Bulls Executive VP and General Manager, Mr. Kenny Williams!!!!
I'm excited to be excited about the Bulls again. If they get some lottery luck, get that Blazers pick, and hire a competent basketball ops team they might genuinely be fun next year for the first time since the Lonzo injury?
Bulls fan since 1970 (I was 7). Feels like the MJ era is the karma kicking our ass now. We can't have nice things. AKME/Eversley were not good at their jobs, glad to see them go.
Is Billy better at being a GM? Can't be worse then Garpax and now AKME/Ev.
How do we even evaluate potential front office folks?
The lesson that I learned with AKME is that we should immediately doubt anyone who would accept the job. JR makes constructing a real team impossible. The only attraction is the lack of accountability.
Let’s be clear: a dog wearing a bow tie would be better at this job than AK.
Maybe I’ll be stunned and proven wrong, but it feels like the only way to go is up.
Would I recommend promoting Billy? Eh maybe. He hasn’t given me any reason to think he’d be bad at the job. His passive aggressive shots that were taken at the roster building this season tells me that he’s not delusional. And the style he implemented after DeMar was traded tells me that he understands the relationship between personnel and playing style.
I’d expect him to be more of a “Brad Stevens Lite” than a “Brad Stevens 2.0”, but even that would be worlds better than AK.
I’d still prefer a proven front office executive running this team, but I think you could definitely do worse than Billy.
I think Billy has genuine integrity and the capacity for personal responsibility. So that's a pretty dramatic step up from AK already. He also clearly has a very high basketball acumen.
Billy's track record at Florida (including as the architect of one of the greatest college basketball teams of all time) is a stronger indication he can run basketball operations than anything in AKME's resume prior to their hire...
yes I agree. Hiring Billy would be typical (likely failure) Bulls move as it's cheap and rewards loyalty over performance .
But as you mentioned Billy has demonstrated more ability than AK at certain aspects of the job, and could be good at player valuation too. Especially if he has resources to hire qualified underlings (doubtful)
hiring Billy is the most typical 'we like our guy' Bulls hire. What has BD shown to prove that he would be a good GM? Knowing him he would just draft guards every year. Sure Brad Stevens has worked out but he seemed like he was more on the cutting edge than Billy is. Just let BD go to UNC....he should be back in college, he would thrive there
Please do an actual GM search and hire somebody up and coming that has new ideas not the same ol cronyism BS
Billy spotted Todd Golden and recommended him to UF's AD when they showed Mike White the door. Golden is a big user of statistics. He uses stats to identify what players to go after in the transfer portal (where he has absolutely crushed it) and what in game adjustments to make.
He and Billy have spent a fair amount of time together, so I'd wager large amounts of money that Billy is very up to date on roster management strategies (even with the big differences between the NCAA & NBA).
I still question his evaluation abilities. He had SGA for a full season, starting him 70 games and playing him 2400 minutes (so not like he was buried, and they just didn't know), and he couldn't see his potential. Also had Wendell Carter, Jr., Lauri Markannen, and Daniel Gafford and at the very least, didn't seem to fight to keep them.
Obviously, it's impossible to know what impact Donovan had in building the roster (especially since KC Johnson refuses to do his job - or what we would think his job to be), but even the guys they decided to keep around or give extensions to (Williams and LaVine) were seemingly poor decisions.
And I guess we could absolve Billy and say that he had absolutely no say in roster construction (and that AKME had absolutely no say in playing time), which may be true, but I don't think that's the case. So who knows?
I agree, Billy has better evaluation skills in that he knew pretty quickly the likes of Dalen Terry and Julian Phillips were no good. But then again he keeps playing Patrick Williams...
Donovan has been the most competent executive on the team since he's been here, but 1) that's not saying much and 2) we don't know how much say he had over roster decisions
Per #2 we have a bit of a double bind here, because if you're hiring him as GM you'd want to know he had some experience in roster construction, but also no team would ever want a GM whose resume listed one job with player personnel experience -- helping put together the Bulls' roster circa 2020-2026.
Nice to have good news come across my phone for a change. Holy shit things are dark in the world. At least we can delude ourselves into thinking there is hope again for this terrible franchise for a year or two
Wow wasn't expecting this really.. not till the actual end of the season at least. Though at least there is no risk that they will be hanging around through the draft now. I mean they couldn't even tear it down right. Their moves at the deadline seemed to be leading up to one last acquisition that never happened. Interested to see what happens. Would not be surprised at all to see Donovan promoted, but bleh.
NEW POST! https://www.blogabull.com/p/bulls-owner-doesnt-know-ball-but
Woooo! So unbelievably happy AK is finally gone. It was long overdue.
Michael Reinsdorf’s statement wasn’t anything too noteworthy. I did find it interesting that he mentioned the fans multiple times. That tells me season ticket renewals are down.
Obviously, optimism can only go so far, because it’s still the Reinsdorfs in charge. But I agree with Ricky when he said that it can’t get worse than AK.
Shams did have the first report minutes before the Bulls statement heh https://x.com/ShamsCharania/status/2041223923367571728
It would have seemed difficult to be worse than GarPax, but AKME were just as bad if not worse, and at least GarPax had some success through 2011 (when they drafted Jimmy) before everything went to sh*t. Good riddance!
It's clearly worse than GarPax.
I mean objectively it's not "clearly" worse when you look at how the GarPax era ended. I think it's just two different flavors of extremely awful.
Obviously, the Pax (and then GarPax) era did give us some pretty high "highs" that were never experienced under AKME.
But looking at the last 5 seasons of the GarPax era, our two coaches were Hoiberg and Boylen. Our results:
2016: 42-40 (missed playoffs)
2017: 41-41 (1st round playoff exit)
2018: 27-55
2019: 22-60
2020 22-43
Despite some good draft positioning, our draft picks during that era were Denzel Valentine, Paul Zipser, Lauri Markkanen (Jimmy trade), Jordan Bell (cash considerations!), Wendell Carter Jr., Chandler Hutchison, Coby White, and Daniel Gafford. Maybe not the WORST group imaginable, but quite uninspiring. And more damning, the Bulls traded Jimmy Butler and spent the next few years trying to build a championship team around Lauri and Zach LaVine.
The last 5 seasons of AKME, until the past 2 months, never sunk as low as those last punishingly awful GarPax years (when the Bulls weren't really even committing to tanking). AKME only had one brief fleeting couple of months of "success", and used that as an excuse NOT to tank -- which is unforgivable. But as much as AKME kept us in NBA Hell, at least for casual fans it was a hell that involved 40ish wins and sniffing the playoffs. GarPax was NBA hell with losing and ineffective wishy-washy quasi-tanking.
But please don't misunderstand my point or think I have anything but bitter contempt for AKME. Just trying to help everyone remember how brutal life was under GarPax.
Well, I'm including the Pax era in GarPax. Sure, if you shave off the good parts of that era than it can go toe-to-toe with AKME. But the good part of the AKME era lasted a few months.
it's all depressing because you look at the results and Lauri, Coby, and WCJ better than all but one AK draft pick (Matas). Even while they were hiring bad coaches and royally screwing up acquiring veterans, Pax still had a better eye for draft talent
Even throwing out the DRose lottery luck, Pax or GarPax drafted Butler, Noah, Deng. All three of those guys rank in the top ten of Bulls career win shares (despite only one of them making it to age 30 on the team).
I mean they didn't technically draft Deng, but it was a draft day trade, so I assume they were making the pick.
Taj too
Pau was also a better FA signing than every single one of AKME's
With Billy not getting the UNC job, my prediction is he moves into a front office position. Don't know if he'll be good at it, but he can't be worse than AKME.
It might not have been "not getting the UNC job" but "Bulls management convincing Billy not to take UNC job by promising him a GM/Exec role and UNC pivoting to their 2nd choice." I guess we'll see when more details come out.
It seems like he essentially took himself out of the running by deciding to finish the season as the Bulls' coach. It was going to be too many days into the transfer window.
his loyalty to Collin Sexton will pay off (Sexton will join the chorus of players in the league who praise Billy Donovan)
KC trying to ruin everyone's good time. Not going to work (today)!
>Reinsdorf, senior advisor John Paxson and Brian Hagen, Pat Connelly and JJ Polk will work collectively at top of basketball opps during search
I’m glad about the news but seeing that Paxson still has a job with the Bulls did dampen my spirits a bit.
Hagen came aboard with Gar, he was essentially a bag man at Iowa State
To be fair, when Pax cared he did some pretty good things with the Bulls and (while lottery luck with DRose played a big factor) they were within a Deng injury and multiple Rose injuries from probably playing in an NBA Finals and maybe winning a ring. Once Gar took over I think Pax just started mailing it in.
yes and that was 10 years ago, the league passed Paxson before then so I can only assume he's way way way out of touch now.
I might need to do some actual research but I’m pretty sure 90% of Paxson’s success can be attributed to being able to fleece Isiah Thomas, and getting incredibly lucky in the 2008 draft.
he did draft decently. he drafted very safely, but it turned out to be a good strategy. Gar's grit study maybe did have something to do with Taj and Jimmy?
Connelly and Polk were hired by Arturas. Connelly has a much more accomplished brother. Polk is the cap guy, though they screwed up the Lonzo-Okoro trade from a trade exception perspective he did not go over the luxury tax which I think is all the cap math Reinsdorf cares about.
According to the Bulls website, Connelly and Polk are listed as assistant GM’s and Hagen is the director of player personnel whatever that means.
I don’t know who Hagen, Connelly or Polk are. My guess is that they have been here for years though.
Where's Doug Collins? : )
Fuck you KC
Who should be hired? Billy moving up would be very Reinsdorfian, rewarding all that bullet-taking, but would it make things better?
I want the Bulls to cut ties with Donovan too, just burn it all to the ground and start fresh. Some Bulls YouTubers have made the argument that Donovan wouldn’t be interested in being an executive. Which I guess is a separate issue from whether or not ownership will try to promote him into that role, but still I hope Donovan’s out of here at season’s end. I’ve heard Masai Ujiri and Bob Myers are available. Myers would be my pick.
I think Donovan's probably got a better chance than most because he has some independent gravitas that commands some respect from the Reinsdorfs.
That is something AK didn't have. So if he went to Reinsdorf and said, "Hey, our FO is like 20 years out of date. We need to add 5 development guys and 10 more scouts and a whole analytics team", Reinsdorf would have given him like a third of that, and then made AK lay a couple of them off without replacing them over the next couple years. In fact this is pretty much what happened. Although I doubt AK even had the temerity to ask for everything needed.
I think it's possible (but not certain) that Donovan would have the pull to ask for something like that get it. Most importantly, I think he probably has other options. He could always leave, and it'd be embarrasing if he just up and left. And I don't think Donovan is the sort of guy who half-asses stuff. He's plugged into the league and knows how things work, and probably would want to hire guys he thinks will make him look good.
For those reasons, I think he's got a better chance of working out than the average "promoted assisstant GM" that isn't going to have the clout to push for doing things the right way.
I have no idea how he'd do with talent evaluation and whatnot, but that'd be moderated by putting an actual system in place.
very good point. While Donovan would be a first-timer at this job, he does have that kind of respect in basketball circles. If 'constrained' by ownership, he's not going to wait 6 years and whine after he's fired like AKME is trying to do.
Holy shit, it has happened.
I am trying to recall the start of their tenure. He was hired in April 2020 and took until March of the following year to do anything except draft Patrick Williams. His excuses for doing nothing sounded insane ("we want to see what we have") and, with the benefit of hindsight, were insane. In league scouting exists idiot.
When it came time to actually take action, it was the Vuc trade, which may be a top 5 worst trade of the decade. He signed DeRozan and we had our "big three". You could squint at DeMar and see a winning player but Zach and Vuc were always empty calories.
I recall these things because, at the time, I was trying not to be a hater. Maybe it was just the culture at the time but this was apparently something you did not want to be. And, god help me, I actually pretended to be optimistic about these moves. Thank god they took down the old site and those posts have not survived. The lesson is never stop hating. Never.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt even after his first (of several) hopeless press conferences.
when he didn't fire Boylen immediately I was worried. I was right! and FIRST!
Holy shit. I totally forgot what he was dragging his feet about. It was freakin' Boylen. How did we ever think this guy was anything other than a dope? Were we ever so naive?
His second off-season was actually pretty great. DeMar played at an all-nba level. Caruso for the MLE was a steal. Lonzo was the perfect fit we needed to make it all work. Of course, then it turned out the whole team depended on Lonzo's knee
It was okay. He got caught tampering in the Lonzo deal, cost the team an asset and failed to build any meaningful depth at the PG position to withstand the loss of Lonzo. He failed to make any moves to replace him at that deadline or in the offseason.
heh didn't you publish a fire AK article in like week 3 after he was hired?
You were indeed correct.
that's right. TOTAL VINDICATION.
Looking back, our only real reason for hope in AK was that the Nuggets had gotten good and AK got credit for drafting their ascending star in the 2nd round.
But I just checked again and Nikola Jokic was picked at #41 after being projected to be taken in the mid-30s to low-40s. So AK could have turned on "auto-draft mode" and the Nugs probably would have taken him as near-consensus top player available. And AK turned that into a 6-year reign as top basketball executive at one of the league's premier franchises!
yeah a key thing is that if the nuggets had any idea how good Jokic could be, they would have taken him earlier and not risked giving every team a shot and a couple 2 shots at him.
Excited for the comprehensive worldwide search for a new exec to end with Michael Reinsdorf’s personal chef or something.
Me the day they fired GarPax: "I'm so thrilled and relieved, this is one of the best days to be a Bulls Fan in a long time -- whatever happens next, it certainly can't be any worse!"
Me, today: "I'm so thrilled and relieved, this is one of the best days to be a Bulls Fan in a long time -- whatever happens next, it certainly can't be any worse!"
Last time Reinsdorf brought in a GM who won a championship, that guy had experienced most of his moderate career success as a baseball scout. So, ladies and gentleman, please welcome your next Bulls Executive VP and General Manager, Mr. Kenny Williams!!!!
I'm excited to be excited about the Bulls again. If they get some lottery luck, get that Blazers pick, and hire a competent basketball ops team they might genuinely be fun next year for the first time since the Lonzo injury?
Bulls fan since 1970 (I was 7). Feels like the MJ era is the karma kicking our ass now. We can't have nice things. AKME/Eversley were not good at their jobs, glad to see them go.
Is Billy better at being a GM? Can't be worse then Garpax and now AKME/Ev.
How do we even evaluate potential front office folks?
The lesson that I learned with AKME is that we should immediately doubt anyone who would accept the job. JR makes constructing a real team impossible. The only attraction is the lack of accountability.
Let’s be clear: a dog wearing a bow tie would be better at this job than AK.
Maybe I’ll be stunned and proven wrong, but it feels like the only way to go is up.
Would I recommend promoting Billy? Eh maybe. He hasn’t given me any reason to think he’d be bad at the job. His passive aggressive shots that were taken at the roster building this season tells me that he’s not delusional. And the style he implemented after DeMar was traded tells me that he understands the relationship between personnel and playing style.
I’d expect him to be more of a “Brad Stevens Lite” than a “Brad Stevens 2.0”, but even that would be worlds better than AK.
I’d still prefer a proven front office executive running this team, but I think you could definitely do worse than Billy.
I think Billy has genuine integrity and the capacity for personal responsibility. So that's a pretty dramatic step up from AK already. He also clearly has a very high basketball acumen.
Billy's track record at Florida (including as the architect of one of the greatest college basketball teams of all time) is a stronger indication he can run basketball operations than anything in AKME's resume prior to their hire...
Not specifically advocating for Billy, but I think I'd be totally fine with it if that's the route
yes I agree. Hiring Billy would be typical (likely failure) Bulls move as it's cheap and rewards loyalty over performance .
But as you mentioned Billy has demonstrated more ability than AK at certain aspects of the job, and could be good at player valuation too. Especially if he has resources to hire qualified underlings (doubtful)
hiring Billy is the most typical 'we like our guy' Bulls hire. What has BD shown to prove that he would be a good GM? Knowing him he would just draft guards every year. Sure Brad Stevens has worked out but he seemed like he was more on the cutting edge than Billy is. Just let BD go to UNC....he should be back in college, he would thrive there
Please do an actual GM search and hire somebody up and coming that has new ideas not the same ol cronyism BS
Brad was also a more successful coach...
Well, more successful in the NBA. Though that's also sort of weighting him with AKME's failure.
Sure but Billy didn't always make the best choices with what he did have.
Billy spotted Todd Golden and recommended him to UF's AD when they showed Mike White the door. Golden is a big user of statistics. He uses stats to identify what players to go after in the transfer portal (where he has absolutely crushed it) and what in game adjustments to make.
He and Billy have spent a fair amount of time together, so I'd wager large amounts of money that Billy is very up to date on roster management strategies (even with the big differences between the NCAA & NBA).
I still question his evaluation abilities. He had SGA for a full season, starting him 70 games and playing him 2400 minutes (so not like he was buried, and they just didn't know), and he couldn't see his potential. Also had Wendell Carter, Jr., Lauri Markannen, and Daniel Gafford and at the very least, didn't seem to fight to keep them.
Obviously, it's impossible to know what impact Donovan had in building the roster (especially since KC Johnson refuses to do his job - or what we would think his job to be), but even the guys they decided to keep around or give extensions to (Williams and LaVine) were seemingly poor decisions.
And I guess we could absolve Billy and say that he had absolutely no say in roster construction (and that AKME had absolutely no say in playing time), which may be true, but I don't think that's the case. So who knows?
I agree, Billy has better evaluation skills in that he knew pretty quickly the likes of Dalen Terry and Julian Phillips were no good. But then again he keeps playing Patrick Williams...
I like to think that he played PWill as much as he did to embarrass AKME.
Donovan has been the most competent executive on the team since he's been here, but 1) that's not saying much and 2) we don't know how much say he had over roster decisions
Per #2 we have a bit of a double bind here, because if you're hiring him as GM you'd want to know he had some experience in roster construction, but also no team would ever want a GM whose resume listed one job with player personnel experience -- helping put together the Bulls' roster circa 2020-2026.
The things with Billy is he'd likely make BD Jr. the head coach. Which would suck.
Cowley 'reported' (sort of) that Wes Unseld would be the new coach, simply because he's under contract. Which does make Reinsdorfian sense
Nice to have good news come across my phone for a change. Holy shit things are dark in the world. At least we can delude ourselves into thinking there is hope again for this terrible franchise for a year or two
would Rodman wearing the pinstripe jersey be a better GM
Wow wasn't expecting this really.. not till the actual end of the season at least. Though at least there is no risk that they will be hanging around through the draft now. I mean they couldn't even tear it down right. Their moves at the deadline seemed to be leading up to one last acquisition that never happened. Interested to see what happens. Would not be surprised at all to see Donovan promoted, but bleh.