Trade deadline reporting reveals further depths of Bulls incompetence

reminder - though maybe some preaching to the choir - that this is a special level of stupid

It’s All-Star weekend, where Matas Buzelis is the only Bulls representative. He was announced last month as participating in the dunk contest, and though it took no less than seven injury replacements he will also play in the Rising Stars game on Friday.

In the wake of another disastrous trade deadline, Buzelis also has earned the label as ‘only interesting Chicago Bull’ for the rest of this regular season. The team - ostensibly in an important evaluation period - limped into the break, including historically-bad back-to-back halves of basketball.

I have more thoughts on this ‘evaluation’, but so many thoughts that it means its own post later. For now, some more post-deadline things, as this is the last time we’ll hear from the Bulls front office until after this (yet another) miserable season is over.

I see a trend with about half the beat - I don’t want to be more specific because it platforms Joe Cowley - where they are still giving AK and the AKME regime too much credit. Inferring or sourcing a secret plan, or parroting this regurgitated bullshit about ‘groundwork’ for future moves, is not going far enough.

Karnisovas is not just a poor talent evaluator and value negotiator, but a stone-cold moron. There’s ample evidence of this due to his words and actions, but to me the smoking gun is his incessant nonsense about taking meaning from the meaningless. Here is something I missed from his latest presser, thankfully Bulls.com wrote it down instead of disappearing it out of self-respect:

"Last three to four years we're not doing well in the last 30 games. I would like to see change"

Again, this isn’t one of many statements, or something taken out of context. This bolsters identical thinking to his repeated preseason words regarding home court advantage.

They are the words of a dumb person. Karnisovas doesn't recognize that there isn't some special factor with home games, or post-deadline games¹, when you don't have a good team! He is admitting, out loud, that he is perplexed over something a competent person would know is obvious: you aren't doing well in these games because you're not doing well overall!

He also lied when saying “obviously we value draft capital the most” when asked about his specific ambitions in these trades². Because it’s proven to be categorically not true. There was reporting after the deadline by John Hollinger - in an article ranking the Bulls 27th trade deadline performance - that the Bulls had an offer of a first round pick for Lonzo Ball.

KC Johnson, PR-adjacent, went Kool-Aid Man style bursting through to defend AK not taking this offer as it may have been a swap of a first for second, or ‘bad long-term money’.

But we can surmise given the deals completed and Hollinger’s professional history that the team was the Memphis Grizzlies. Memphis wound up making two deadline deals to (pretty shamefully, IMO) reduce their payroll the next two seasons:

Out: Marcus Smart ($21.5M next season), Jake LaRavia ($3.4M, expiring), 1 first round pick (their own 2025)

In: 0 useful players (all on expiring salary), 2 second round picks

Now it stands to reason - like, objectively reason, so not covering for AK for professional purposes - that getting Lonzo Ball instead of players who were either waived or benched would have gotten the Bulls even more from Memphis. And note that the excuse of ‘the Bulls shouldn’t be sending out 2nd rounders’ is only because they have neglected to acquire them the past 3 years! The Wizards had over double what the Bulls had, and in a separate deadline trade (you can do more than one?!?) packaged 4 of them into a first round pick.

So why did the Bulls turn that Grizzlies offer down? Because no, they do not value first round picks more than anything else. In this case they don’t even value ‘young players with experience’, as LaRavia is only 23 and is taller than 6’6” so therefore interesting.

In eschewing this Lonzo trade, plus holding out and ultimately turning down a Vuc trade to the Warriors because it didn’t give them back a good enough pick, they clearly do value marginal cap flexibility (Lonzo’s extension will see him paid half of what Smart makes next season), and, uh veteran leadership or whatever?

It’s certainly not a matter of turning down these deals now for a better one later. That is so unlikely that any reporter saying that is not being genuine and is instead running cover for Karnisovas. Thankfully not all believe this, and recognize what’s really happening: Karnisovas simply likes Vucevic and Lonzo and thinks they bring value to building out this team.

This past deadline, with the above moves not made, others finally made, and Karnisovas’s own words, was a failure in that they received no additional assets. Not specifically that they didn’t fully tank this year’s team. Tanking is something set in motion from leadership and done before a season, it’s been too late for a while: the Bulls, before and after the deadline, are entrenched in between 7th and 10th in the tank race. You could argue 6th, but I think the Brooklyn Nets are more determined given their trades this season. Maybe the Sixers similarly pull the plug. The Bulls have nothing left they can meaningfully do. Vucevic, as predicted - and likely why nobody raised offers for him - stinks again, it doesn’t contribute to wins or losses one way or the other versus a backup. They can do some strategic resting of him and others, but other teams will be doing this as well. It’s really up to luck whether they can increase their luck on lottery night.

That current status is why I was so pissed off reading this from Will Gottlieb at CHGO after the truly embarrassing blowout loss to the Pistons:

For the booing fans — this is what you have been asking for. These are the beginning stages of the rebuild. The losses are going to continue to come. They won’t all be this ugly, but some will. That’s OK. It’s what the Bulls are signing up for and it’s what they need to go through to come out the other end as a team that can eventually compete at a high level.

No, man, and a special demerit for the condescending tone.

Bulls fans didn’t ask for this. They don’t want a miserable product, and they don’t want to see these morons purposefully build a team that loses the most games possible this season.

We want a contending team, like any other fanbase. Any short-term desire for a tank is out of desperation: with this front office there is no hope for building a contender even partially through skill, instead the Bulls need to be entirely reliant on lottery luck.

The better beginning stages of a rebuild is firing the front office. But we are smart enough to know that isn’t likely, so instead it is just waiting for May to provide a result so transformative that it’s of higher value than getting new management.

In the meantime, we can call this garbage out for what it is, and insult the people in charge while we’re at it. They’ve earned it.

1. if anything, post-deadline game segments are LESS meaningful, because of tanking and playoff positioning and injury attrition across the league. And they did well in this segment of games two years ago because of these factors and daring to ‘disrupt the locker room’ with the addition of Patrick Beverley

2. But this perhaps is less outright stupidity and more being a poor communicator - I think he just said that it was top because it was the first thing mentioned to him in the question.