Bulls management too afraid to set goals, so we can for them

a predictable media day,. but still worth discussing

I almost wasn’t going to do a post describing the Media Day availability from Bulls head bozo Arturas Karnisovas, because it held so true to form. I’m not giving myself credit for ‘calling it’, AKME¹ is not smart enough to be unpredictable.

Chicago Bulls 2025 Media Day ::looks up antonym for 'anticipation'::

With his usual MO of having Billy Donovan up as a shield while poorly reading a prepared statement, Karnisovas had a few major points he wanted to get across, ones that we had heard since the end of last season.

this is the thumbnail from their official YouTube, ha

I thought the assembled reporters did a good job of trying to get Karnisovas to commit and/or expound on anything, and his lack of ability to do so was telling in and of itself.

Karnisovas refused, on multiple occasions, to set a goal of making the playoffs, implying that an objective benchmark like that was tantamount to ‘skipping steps’ in their ultimate goal of winning a championship.²

“Building while competing is the goal. Every decision (is) tied to that. We’re gonna focus on winning every game without putting any goals on a team besides just getting better and growing together.”

This is, of course, a stupid and cowardly way to lead a basketball team heading into the season. But that is also far from new, to the point where you can call it their management style.

On AKME’s behalf, we can set the goal of “making the playoffs, the dogcrap Eastern Conference playoffs by the way”, and not just because of it showing any kind of ambition, but it is logically what the team needs to do for this plan to work.

The stated plan³ of ‘building while competing’, and that this is merely year two of a many-years ‘roster transition’…that’s already a failure. Due to their botched teardown of the last halfway-decent Bulls team, they don’t have a top-5 draft pick nor a surplus of future picks. They’ve built the back end of their roster not on high-upside swings for ‘building’, but fill-ins that should see little dropoff during the 82-game grind for ‘competing’.

And due to their cap situation, they don’t have many years to figure out what they have and who should remain with the team as they go for their ultimate goal of a championship first round playoff series with guaranteed home attendance.

Because the best source of that information is the playoffs, a laboratory (as Hollinger & Duncan, say: a crucible!) much more useful than Mickey Mouse March. For example, it’s a time when the Oklahoma City Thunder learned to not keep Josh Giddey.

When pressed to at least acknowledge how the season ended - not with 15-5 record, but with a home blowout loss to a pretty bad Heat team in the 9/10 play-in game - Karnisovas did say that they did learn lessons from it.

I won’t even belabor the point that that he said the main lesson was that they needed ‘physicality’, and that Isaac Okoro - a cast-off from an actual playoff team because he’s a plateaued one-way player - will be the difference⁴.

It’s that Karnisovas said such information was useful…yet won’t say that he wants that information again, let alone even better information that can be gleaned from making the actual playoffs.

Again, this isn’t early in a rebuild, and you can argue that’s because they’ve already ‘skipped steps’ in their pursuit of Young Players With Experience (and short contracts). But making the playoffs would not be ‘skipping steps’. That’s merely ‘taking steps’.

As Will Gottlieb at CHGO pointed out, it is especially strange that AK would still talk this way, presumably to avoid blowback, given that AK has the benefit of 1) job security and 2) helming a totally irrelevant team. If anybody, it’s only the players who now know that their leader has no expectations for them. Fans already knew.

1. Marc Eversley said the same thing over the summer!

2. LOL

3. shout-out latest Cash Considerations episode for this point

4. I’m pretty confident that there has never been a day in his career - perhaps even back to high school - where Isaac Okoro was so prominently mentioned