For the sole team in the NBA’s third-biggest market (both New York and Los Angeles have two clubs apiece), the Chicago Bulls have been an absolute exercise in irrelevance for the better part of a decade at this point. To wit, Chicago has been given just three nationally broadcast games heading into the 2025-26 season, more than only five clubs who got only two such games per — the Brooklyn Nets, New Orleans Pelicans, Utha Jazz and Washington Wizards.
Since trading away future Hall of Fame swingman Jimmy Butler during his absolute prime in 2017, the team has made the playoffs just once. Butler, meanwhile, has made the playoffs every season and has appeared in two NBA Finals.
Understandably, without any obvious blue chippers, Ben Rohrbach of Yahoo Sports has slammed team president Arturas Karnisovas in a new ranking of the NBA’s front office leaders. Rohrbach’s rankings cover just 23 of the 30 top decision makers for each club, as Rohrbach notes that seven such figures haven’t been on the job long enough for him to make a definitive qualitative appraisal.
“It should come as no surprise that Karnisovas’ Bulls rank dead last. The once-proud franchise has been a mess ever since Michael Jordan left in 1998, save for a short-lived resurgence under Derrick Rose,” Rohrbach writes. “They have made the playoffs once under Karnisovas, getting gentlemanly swept from the first round in 2022.”
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Karnisovas, who has been in power since 2020, replaced the Bulls’ prior one-two front office punch of John Paxson and Gar Forman — both of whom were criticized for not making enough trades and signing over-the-hill veterans during the team’s Rose era. Compared to Karnisovas, Paxson and Forman made trades at the rate of Danny Ainge. Both front offices generally prioritized past-their-prime free agents.
Paxson and Forman’s critical decision to offload Butler eventually led to their departure three seasons later, following a middling rebuild attempt (which Forman pretended was a mere “retooling” for some misguided semantic reason).
“Other than that, the Bulls have been an annual entrant into the Eastern Conference’s play-in tournament, where they regularly have lost, staying stuck in the NBA’s dreaded middle for the better part of a decade,” Rohrbach adds.
Not making the playoffs for three straight seasons — even in what is essentially the NBA’s JV conference (the East) — when a majority of teams (16 of 30) do make the playoffs doesn’t make the Bulls mediocre, despite their records hovering around .500 for the last several seasons. It makes them bad.
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