Nobody cares to know what the Bulls are doing, and that's how they like it

if there is a plan, they're keeping it a big secret

[Update 7/31 - mere minutes after publishing this post bemoaning the lack of media attention and first-sourced reporting on the Bulls, ESPN.com’s Jamal Collier posted a lengthy article with quotes from from Marc Eversley and ‘sources’. I believe a lot of it was already from the mentioned scrum during summer league, but there was even more (and perhaps reiteration). I’ll try to add them in here where they fit. -yfbb]

Not much going on in Bulls world. Summer League has wrapped, Josh Giddey is playing in the Olympics, Dalen Terry is participating at his correct amateur level, Zach LaVine still hasn’t been traded yet.

The Bulls’ highest-paid player still being likely on the move should be more intriguing than it is. But given the player and the team, it actually makes little difference whether LaVine takes the court or not and who they receive in a trade. I still maintain that Zach has played his last game as a Bull and this may get messy at training camp, but the Bulls are correct - first time for everything - in posturing for now that they expect him back.

[edited to add: In what was perhaps the juiciest bit of the Collier article, there was a “team source” calling LaVine a losing player that should, if he wants to get out of town, report to camp and “be compliant”. That’s pretty aggressive posturing, if still (in my opinion) posturing. Not to mention it doesn’t make sense that Zach would start to be seen as a winning player playing for a team that won’t win many games this year.]

That is what they said, among a lot of other things, in a rare press scrum with Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley that occurred during summer league.

Rare, yet not notable. At the time I didn’t even have a full post on AKME’s quotes because it was mostly vague, or contradictory, or alarming admission of incompetence that we’ve already heard from them many times.

But I was reminded of it recently not because of the content of their answers, but because of the media reaction to it. It reaffirmed a longstanding factor with this franchise in that there really isn’t a lot of attention on them, and as a result fans are left with little idea of what they’re doing, let alone providing any confidence in them doing it.

I’m not even referring to the idea that their anecdotes of idiocy need to be “called out”¹ , but the lack of a stated plan, or acknowledgement of their prior actions and what they’ve learned from them.

Recall at the end of last season, Karnisovas said his goal was to never be non-competitive, always look to improve this team, specifically finding ten more wins. The main part of that plan was an intent² to retain DeMar DeRozan.

What happened wasn’t that they saw the light and changed direction, it was that they screwed it up. Everything else (including a future LaVine trade, as that’s not going to get you anything but walking contracts at best) is relatively inconsequential: DeRozan was “the direction”, and without him they’re clearly heading down.

The execution, an out-of-sequence and mis-prioritized teardown, should’ve been clear to everyone as it was to national observers: what occurred was a failure.

And while that can happen, and certain things were indeed out of their control, AKME could’ve acknowledged that and explained their thought process in “pivoting”. But these guys…these are not my kind of guys. They instead puffed and blew out self-congratulations that they were honest in that “change” was the plan all along. Plus a defiance in refusing to admit they will be a worse team without their most positive-impacting players. AK even reiterated, after trading those two players, that “we’re not going to make deals that are not going to make us better”. Clearly not true!

[edited to add from Collier article] And here was Eversley, directly quoted, telling everyone they are not intending to tank:

“There's no appetite in our building to go young and just blow it all up. We've gone young. We've got players who are experienced and give us a greater opportunity to have a longer runway for sustainability to winning meaningful games for a longer time. I don't want to, a year from now, [be] winning 15 games and focusing on the lottery. We have an opportunity here to roll out younger players who give us an opportunity to turn this thing around, maybe not quicker, but in a more pragmatic approach than just looking at the future and building through the draft."

Again, I don’t mean this to be yet another bashing session of AKME. They mostly hide and whenever they stop hiding it winds up providing people reasons to be less confident in them than before. They should’ve been fired already and the first and best course of action in a franchise rebuild would be to replace them.

Instead, what was notable to me in this most recent media circuit was the lack of pushback from the dwindling beat members there to hear this³. They took AKME’s quotes at face value and deemed them thoughtful and complete, and any analysis or context offered was like they gave up on getting answers so they’re just speculating their own. Part of the beat’s job⁴ should be to try and educate fans on what this front office is doing. And if the executives aren’t forthcoming, try to find out things in other ways.

Instead, we have this odd dynamic where the team is saying one thing, the results are incongruent with that and outright poor, and then the reaction isn’t telling that truth, but instead trying to equivocate and project their own personally-preferred plan (making a terrible team on purpose to get a higher 2025 draft pick out of desperation) as some kind of self-therapy that surely the people in power they cover can’t be this bad at it.

I recognize this year is gonna suuuuuuuck. Bad AND boring. I get that it means the people paid to cover the team are in for an even worse time as they can’t opt out. I sympathize, but am pleading: don’t make it worse for me and other fans by letting up on the org.’s failures after they accidentally get a high draft pick.

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This failure in professional coverage of one of the top 5 largest franchises in the league extends to little things.

Like how the head coach received a contract extension and nobody knew for months. Then the GM did as well and though reported somewhat quickly it was buried in a mailbag column. We still don’t totally know what happened with assistant coach Mo Cheeks, who was reportedly being put in semi-retirement only to flee to the Knicks.

And after AK vowed after last season that the front office did not require change (the only thing that was deemed off the table in that press conference), a scout left for the Pistons and maybe their Director of Pro Personnel (who’s been there for over a decade) is gone too?

That last bit was not in ‘the news’, but merely delivered on a dying misinformation-filled social media app by nominal “reporter” Joe CowIey⁵ of the Chicago Sun-Times and therefore cannot be trusted. And nobody else is even trying to find out.

And the worst part of this status is that it’s one of the few Bulls things that is according to plan. They hate scrutiny, and would prefer their small family business be left alone to make a ton of money.

If they win anything, that’s a bonus. But we have already been shown by this front office that they are incapable of that. So now they’ve “pivoted” to create a team so boring, with executives so bad at communicating, that it’s in nobody’s best interest (with a vested interest) to try and find out more.

1. owing it to DeRozan personally to not trade him last season so he could…go for the 9th seed? what? And worse, in the Collier article he says they also owed it to Vuc!

2. this, unlike most things, is more easily inferred by their comments

3. edited to add: credit to Collier for not simply playing stenographer. He remarked on alternative paths the Bulls could’ve taken earlier, and even this summer. Though I question Collier’s analysis chops with this line: “it's unclear whether their young core is talented enough to match other young rising East teams like Indiana, Cleveland and Orlando.”

4. well, maybe not those that work for the Bulls or a media partner

5. I don’t not-trust Joe because the oft-cited criticism of him being “too negative”. For one thing, he’s very tight with Michael Reinsdorf so I don’t even think he’s that negative towards ownership. But he has proven to be too stupid to interpret and communicate information correctly. He’s a total dipshit is what I’m staying, especially his Twxtter persona (if it is a persona) that has stuff he won’t even put in the paper. It’s a really sorry state of this franchise’s standing where that guy is one of the few remaining covering the team who don’t work for the team or a media partner.