I wonder how much autonomy the new front office will have to fire the old staff and hire their own staff. I would have to look, but there might be some people left from the Krause regime still floating around. I know that there are still people from the GarPax left.
This is almost a roundabout way of making a case for Matt Lloyd, in that he instantly reassumes his place as another Krause-era remnant, and none of the tough work of purging the old loyalist guard is required. Nor are hard conversations about what "autonomy" looks like under the Reinsdorfs. Nor is Pax's own job threatened.
AK couldn't purge the old staff, but was able to hire people. Then he kind of stopped and started firing (Peter Patton, Steve Weinman), and it was never a large front office even after hiring
I also don't think Paxson and the like actually want to work, so much that they won't bother trying to influence decisions. But I could see it as a problem for someone with stature to even have these guys in the building
if ownership caps the hiring ability because they have to pay existing guys on the payroll, that's fucked. I don't think that's likely but it's possible, and heck it could be part of Matt Lloyd's pitch that he doesn't need all new people, which ownership takes as a positive quality
FWIW I don't see *Jim* Paxson in the staff directory anymore!
But there's still John. Brian Hagen (Gar guy). Ivica Dukan (scouted Tony Kukoc for fuck's sake), and I see another Dukan is a scout. Dave Bollwinkel has been a Bulls scout for 20 years.
AK hires Pat Connelly and JJ Polk are still listed. Then there's the small-but-exists analytics department. And the player development staff that they just had backfill Patton's role. It's called BEING LEAN.
I've said this in previous comments here but I'm feeling more and more confident that Matt Lloyd taking over was inevitable from the moment AK was fired. And quite possibly BEFORE the firing... Pax and the 'Dorfs maybe may have gotten a handshake deal with him (or at least "yes, I'd be interested in the job" signals) that precipitated AKME being dumped.
Just like with the Bears' hiring of Ben Johnson last year, all of the other interviews may be just smoke and mirrors.
But honestly, I'm okay with Lloyd. He seems competent and affable and certainly has a resume worthy of a shot at the top job. And as I noted in a separate comment, he knows how the game is played under the Reinsdorfs. The idea that they'd give free reign to a hotshot GM, or that a slick, clever, and persuasive GM would talk ownership into doing things differently is a fantasy. The new Bulls GM will have to rebuild under the team's current value system and business model. Lloyd knows exactly what that means in practice.
yes I'm ok with it, especially after acknowledging (I'll never resign to it) Reinsdorfian limitations
but I have no assumptions that Lloyd will be a good GM based on his past experience. He may be, may be not. I will give him the benefit of the doubt until his first questionable move.
Agreed, he (or any of the current guys in the running) would get the benefit of the doubt from me. Partly just because I'm desperate as a fan to start being a hopeful optimist again (the last few years of GarPax and all but the first few months of AKME have been "things can only get worse" mode).
Honestly for the new GM, in many ways it's better to be lucky than good. Would Krause have found a superstar and built a contending team around him without Rod Thorn's fortunate choice of MJ at #3? Would GarPax have ever gotten a team to the "championship contender" level without Rose? While there are some exceptions and truly elite execs out there, it's true that for most of the championship contending teams in the history of the modern NBA, they got there based on either hitting the right ping pong ball in the right year, or by having "project" draft pick develop into a superstar under their watch. And many of the smart, competent GMs have seen their plans derailed by bad lottery luck or injury luck.
We do have five years of data from Krause’s rebuild after the dynasty and the results were mixed at best. Tyson Chandler was the best player he drafted, but it still took almost a decade for Chandler to reach his potential and he was never a good scorer. The biggest problem of the Krause rebuild was that there were very few superstars in those drafts. From 1999 to 2002, there were only five of fame players drafted. Two of those were Manu Ginobli and Tony Parker and they don’t make the hall of fame if they didn’t play for the Spurs since they fit that system perfectly.
I agree with you, and those years are Exhibit A for why it's better to be lucky than good. I have very mixed feelings on Jerry Krause's legacy but he did something bold and, in a vacuum, fairly smart, to break up the dynasty:
1. Sell off as many '90s Bulls assets as quickly as possible before they lost value, and accumulate picks
2. Get very bad, as quickly as possible to ensure you have good lottery odds.
3. Free up maximum cap space for free agent signings
Unfortunately he misread the free agent market (e.g., Tracy McGrady) and the reputational damage the dynasty breakup did to the franchise around the league. And he was extremely unlucky to have those 4 draft classes form the core of his strategy. Honestly I just looked and there's really not much Jerry Krause could have done with his picks those years. For those four drafts you noted from '99-'02, you could go back in the "what if" machine and take any TWO top-10 players from each draft, and that 8-man "super team" you assembled would have had trouble making it out of the 1st round of the playoffs in a weak Eastern Conference.
For me, the fantasy is always that we hire someone with prestige and competence and, after a week in charge, they sit down ownership and tell them that the organization is a disgrace and that you cannot run a basketball team like this. And then they go to the mat and hopefully the team gets dragged into the 21st century. So knowing how things work in Reinsdorf land is not actually a positive for me but I may also be delusional about the way power works.
I mean, this is exactly what should happen and really the only way to achieve and sustain excellence. It's the appropriate fantasy.
But it's not going to work this way. Things might change incrementally under a new head exec, but there is a fundamental fact that the Reinsdorfs see owning a basketball team as a business endeavor, and they answer to their ownership group who are investors in financial success more than in success on the court.
As long as fans are filling the UC and there are robust revenue streams, Reinsdorf and the ownership group have achieved their main objective. I'm sure they also "want" to win games and championships, but they aren't making it priority #1.
I've just read the league's lottery proposal, and on its face it looks like it actually will punish tanking: teams in spots 4-10 get 3 ping pong balls, teams in spots 1-3 get 2 balls each, the play-in losers get 2 balls apiece, and the play-in winners get 1 ball. Teams 1-3 get pick as low as 12th, the rest of the teams can pick anywhere from 1-16.
It's ironic that it looks like the Bulls are in a position to really bottom out, only for that to become a real negative for the team. I guess it's AK's parting gift to the franchise.
I've noted this previously but if you applied this proposal retroactively to what the Bulls/AKME were attempting for the last 5 years, they would look like geniuses.
Well, nothing could make AK look like an actual genius, but the AKME/Reinsdorf strategy (stay good enough to make the play-in, don't accidentally get really bad, and don't overcommit resources to trying to be better until you're sure you have a championship core) is going to be the winning play for team building if this proposal gets adopted.
The Bill Simmons pod just discussed this and they concluded that this really won’t fix tanking and will just prevent mediocre teams from wanting to make a play-in push.
I think they’re mostly right and it’s pretty funny that the league’s new anti-tanking ideas will be counterproductive to their previous anti-tanking idea (the play-in tournament).
With that said, I do think this will help prevent teams from tanking in truly egregious ways, which is probably the only thing the league actually cares about right now.
I think this is right, the league isn't concerned about parity or small market teams as much as the egregious self-sabotage that contributes to the league wide perception problem of the regular season being meaningless
maybe this has unintended consequences and doesn't cure the disease, but it addresses the worst symptom
There was no reason for Utah to not simply let Murphy hit unrestricted free agency and then sign him then. Or not bring him on the team at all, he never played for the Jazz or any NBA team again.
Who was the Utah GM at that time, doing the Bulls this favor? Dennis Lindsey.
The best case for Matt Lloyd, given our lack of inside information, is that the Bulls mainly drafted well while he was there, and mainly did not after he left, and there wasn’t anyone else in that front office who seemed likely to know what he was doing.
Here’s a crazy stat: Vuc has not seen the second round of the playoffs since his rookie season when the Sixers beat the Bulls after Rose got hurt. He played three minutes per game in that series.
Michael Scott saying there's a chance they hire Lloyd for the top spot and Dave Lewin for #2 which would include leading the analytics department. Would seem to imply a significant expansion of analytics staff, if they're making that splashy of a hire.
My thoughts exactly. They’re waiting for the Wolves season to end to make an announcement. Benny the Bull should represent the team at the draft lottery. If the Bulls get the #1 pick, he can hit Silver with a bag of popcorn.
His drafting track record includes finds such as Trey Murphy III (drafted 17th overall), Herb Jones (35th), Dyson Daniels (8th) and Nickeil Alexander-Walker (17th), the latter two who went on to win Most Improved Player awards in back-to-back years.
Graham also helped facilitate negotiations between the Pelicans and Hawks during the draft last year that saw Atlanta gain the Pelicans' 2026 first-round pick, one of the more coveted draft assets in the league this year.
I wonder how much autonomy the new front office will have to fire the old staff and hire their own staff. I would have to look, but there might be some people left from the Krause regime still floating around. I know that there are still people from the GarPax left.
This is almost a roundabout way of making a case for Matt Lloyd, in that he instantly reassumes his place as another Krause-era remnant, and none of the tough work of purging the old loyalist guard is required. Nor are hard conversations about what "autonomy" looks like under the Reinsdorfs. Nor is Pax's own job threatened.
AK couldn't purge the old staff, but was able to hire people. Then he kind of stopped and started firing (Peter Patton, Steve Weinman), and it was never a large front office even after hiring
I also don't think Paxson and the like actually want to work, so much that they won't bother trying to influence decisions. But I could see it as a problem for someone with stature to even have these guys in the building
if ownership caps the hiring ability because they have to pay existing guys on the payroll, that's fucked. I don't think that's likely but it's possible, and heck it could be part of Matt Lloyd's pitch that he doesn't need all new people, which ownership takes as a positive quality
FWIW I don't see *Jim* Paxson in the staff directory anymore!
But there's still John. Brian Hagen (Gar guy). Ivica Dukan (scouted Tony Kukoc for fuck's sake), and I see another Dukan is a scout. Dave Bollwinkel has been a Bulls scout for 20 years.
AK hires Pat Connelly and JJ Polk are still listed. Then there's the small-but-exists analytics department. And the player development staff that they just had backfill Patton's role. It's called BEING LEAN.
I've said this in previous comments here but I'm feeling more and more confident that Matt Lloyd taking over was inevitable from the moment AK was fired. And quite possibly BEFORE the firing... Pax and the 'Dorfs maybe may have gotten a handshake deal with him (or at least "yes, I'd be interested in the job" signals) that precipitated AKME being dumped.
Just like with the Bears' hiring of Ben Johnson last year, all of the other interviews may be just smoke and mirrors.
But honestly, I'm okay with Lloyd. He seems competent and affable and certainly has a resume worthy of a shot at the top job. And as I noted in a separate comment, he knows how the game is played under the Reinsdorfs. The idea that they'd give free reign to a hotshot GM, or that a slick, clever, and persuasive GM would talk ownership into doing things differently is a fantasy. The new Bulls GM will have to rebuild under the team's current value system and business model. Lloyd knows exactly what that means in practice.
yes I'm ok with it, especially after acknowledging (I'll never resign to it) Reinsdorfian limitations
but I have no assumptions that Lloyd will be a good GM based on his past experience. He may be, may be not. I will give him the benefit of the doubt until his first questionable move.
Agreed, he (or any of the current guys in the running) would get the benefit of the doubt from me. Partly just because I'm desperate as a fan to start being a hopeful optimist again (the last few years of GarPax and all but the first few months of AKME have been "things can only get worse" mode).
Honestly for the new GM, in many ways it's better to be lucky than good. Would Krause have found a superstar and built a contending team around him without Rod Thorn's fortunate choice of MJ at #3? Would GarPax have ever gotten a team to the "championship contender" level without Rose? While there are some exceptions and truly elite execs out there, it's true that for most of the championship contending teams in the history of the modern NBA, they got there based on either hitting the right ping pong ball in the right year, or by having "project" draft pick develop into a superstar under their watch. And many of the smart, competent GMs have seen their plans derailed by bad lottery luck or injury luck.
We do have five years of data from Krause’s rebuild after the dynasty and the results were mixed at best. Tyson Chandler was the best player he drafted, but it still took almost a decade for Chandler to reach his potential and he was never a good scorer. The biggest problem of the Krause rebuild was that there were very few superstars in those drafts. From 1999 to 2002, there were only five of fame players drafted. Two of those were Manu Ginobli and Tony Parker and they don’t make the hall of fame if they didn’t play for the Spurs since they fit that system perfectly.
I agree with you, and those years are Exhibit A for why it's better to be lucky than good. I have very mixed feelings on Jerry Krause's legacy but he did something bold and, in a vacuum, fairly smart, to break up the dynasty:
1. Sell off as many '90s Bulls assets as quickly as possible before they lost value, and accumulate picks
2. Get very bad, as quickly as possible to ensure you have good lottery odds.
3. Free up maximum cap space for free agent signings
Unfortunately he misread the free agent market (e.g., Tracy McGrady) and the reputational damage the dynasty breakup did to the franchise around the league. And he was extremely unlucky to have those 4 draft classes form the core of his strategy. Honestly I just looked and there's really not much Jerry Krause could have done with his picks those years. For those four drafts you noted from '99-'02, you could go back in the "what if" machine and take any TWO top-10 players from each draft, and that 8-man "super team" you assembled would have had trouble making it out of the 1st round of the playoffs in a weak Eastern Conference.
was tyson better than elton brand, I'm not really sure how they compare really. wildly different skillsets
For me, the fantasy is always that we hire someone with prestige and competence and, after a week in charge, they sit down ownership and tell them that the organization is a disgrace and that you cannot run a basketball team like this. And then they go to the mat and hopefully the team gets dragged into the 21st century. So knowing how things work in Reinsdorf land is not actually a positive for me but I may also be delusional about the way power works.
I mean, this is exactly what should happen and really the only way to achieve and sustain excellence. It's the appropriate fantasy.
But it's not going to work this way. Things might change incrementally under a new head exec, but there is a fundamental fact that the Reinsdorfs see owning a basketball team as a business endeavor, and they answer to their ownership group who are investors in financial success more than in success on the court.
As long as fans are filling the UC and there are robust revenue streams, Reinsdorf and the ownership group have achieved their main objective. I'm sure they also "want" to win games and championships, but they aren't making it priority #1.
if it wasn't 'on the record' already, this would be my preference: hire Masai Ujiri and he has a whole slew of underlings coming with him
I've just read the league's lottery proposal, and on its face it looks like it actually will punish tanking: teams in spots 4-10 get 3 ping pong balls, teams in spots 1-3 get 2 balls each, the play-in losers get 2 balls apiece, and the play-in winners get 1 ball. Teams 1-3 get pick as low as 12th, the rest of the teams can pick anywhere from 1-16.
It's ironic that it looks like the Bulls are in a position to really bottom out, only for that to become a real negative for the team. I guess it's AK's parting gift to the franchise.
I've noted this previously but if you applied this proposal retroactively to what the Bulls/AKME were attempting for the last 5 years, they would look like geniuses.
Well, nothing could make AK look like an actual genius, but the AKME/Reinsdorf strategy (stay good enough to make the play-in, don't accidentally get really bad, and don't overcommit resources to trying to be better until you're sure you have a championship core) is going to be the winning play for team building if this proposal gets adopted.
They should call it the Reinsdorf Rule.
their strategy was not "don't accidentally get really bad", it was don't PURPOSEFULLY get really bad
and that shouldn't be a strategy! if these new rules eliminate that as a strategy then it's good
The Bill Simmons pod just discussed this and they concluded that this really won’t fix tanking and will just prevent mediocre teams from wanting to make a play-in push.
I think they’re mostly right and it’s pretty funny that the league’s new anti-tanking ideas will be counterproductive to their previous anti-tanking idea (the play-in tournament).
With that said, I do think this will help prevent teams from tanking in truly egregious ways, which is probably the only thing the league actually cares about right now.
I think this is right, the league isn't concerned about parity or small market teams as much as the egregious self-sabotage that contributes to the league wide perception problem of the regular season being meaningless
maybe this has unintended consequences and doesn't cure the disease, but it addresses the worst symptom
Right. It’s not some coincidence these conversations started after what the Jazz and Wizards did this season. THAT’S what they’re upset about.
If they cared about teams actually doing everything they can to be truly competitive, they would have forced Reinsdorf to sell the Bulls years ago lol
also the next two drafts are supposed to be much worse than the prior two
Stephen Noh's column on this I disagreed with
https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/anti-tanking-draft-reform-proposal-disaster-waiting-reform-flop/9d9248144baf7b17f2f4b8c0
but he did link a cool new lotto simulator. My first 'spin' and Bulls got #13 pick, damnit
https://draft-lottery-simulator.figma.site/
I got a lot of jumps in 10 pulls, a few 3's and a 2
KC Johnson mentioned Dennis Lindsey and John Paxson were contemporaries as team GMs in the early 2010s
I recall a very weird moment in Bulls history, when in 2014 after the trade deadline they waived Erik Murphy's guaranteed salary, and the Utah Jazz claimed him and the contract, allowing the Bulls to stay under the luxury tax. https://www.nbcsports.com/nba/news/jazz-claim-erik-murphy-off-waivers-potentially-saving-bulls-from-luxury-tax
There was no reason for Utah to not simply let Murphy hit unrestricted free agency and then sign him then. Or not bring him on the team at all, he never played for the Jazz or any NBA team again.
Who was the Utah GM at that time, doing the Bulls this favor? Dennis Lindsey.
welp
The best case for Matt Lloyd, given our lack of inside information, is that the Bulls mainly drafted well while he was there, and mainly did not after he left, and there wasn’t anyone else in that front office who seemed likely to know what he was doing.
Here’s a crazy stat: Vuc has not seen the second round of the playoffs since his rookie season when the Sixers beat the Bulls after Rose got hurt. He played three minutes per game in that series.
Correction to my last post: Vuc played three total playoff minutes his rookie year.
Michael Scott saying there's a chance they hire Lloyd for the top spot and Dave Lewin for #2 which would include leading the analytics department. Would seem to imply a significant expansion of analytics staff, if they're making that splashy of a hire.
It's weird. Feeling sort of hopeful.
Scotto that is...
Don't fall for it, it's the hope that kills you...
Welp, that Orlando job might be there for Billy if he wants it…
Mavs hire Masai Ujiri
Makes sense.
My guess is the Bulls offered Matt Lloyd the job heading into the weekend and we’re just waiting for the announcement.
My thoughts exactly. They’re waiting for the Wolves season to end to make an announcement. Benny the Bull should represent the team at the draft lottery. If the Bulls get the #1 pick, he can hit Silver with a bag of popcorn.
I don’t think they’re going to wait that long.
The Wolves season is going AT LEAST until the 10th, which is the same day as not only the lottery, but also the beginning of the draft combine.
I doubt they’d be ok with not having a GM at the combine.
My guess is we’ll hear about the hire within the next couple of days.
Moot point! They’re hiring Bryson Graham from the Hawks!
https://www.espn.com/contributor/shams-charania/b0108383c485c
Bull hired Bryson Graham
Shams lists these as his credits:
His drafting track record includes finds such as Trey Murphy III (drafted 17th overall), Herb Jones (35th), Dyson Daniels (8th) and Nickeil Alexander-Walker (17th), the latter two who went on to win Most Improved Player awards in back-to-back years.
Graham also helped facilitate negotiations between the Pelicans and Hawks during the draft last year that saw Atlanta gain the Pelicans' 2026 first-round pick, one of the more coveted draft assets in the league this year.