The Chicago Bulls are stuck in a hole. It’s unavoidable. And executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnišovas knows it.
A 5-14 record. A five-game losing streak. A star player pushing for a trade. The first five weeks of the season have quickly tanked any hopes the rebuild centered on Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic would finally begin to click.
Karnišovas acknowledged the gravity of the situation in a brief conversation with three reporters at the team’s shootaround in Boston before Tuesday night’s 124-97 loss to the Celtics.
“We see what everyone is seeing and are just as frustrated,” Karnišovas said. “We’re disappointed, but I’m not running from it. It’s my responsibility.”
This is not the season the Bulls were expecting. That has been clear from top to bottom. The front office returned the majority of the roster with the expectation the Bulls could build off the defensive rigor of last season and develop young players while relying on the consistency of their central trio.
Instead, the bottom fell out on opening night. The Bulls are in the bottom 10 in the league in both offense and defense. They struggle to crack 100 points each night. And even their stars are performing well below career averages as the team remains mired in a baffling shooting slump.
“It didn’t feel like we would be at this point right now, but that’s our reality,” LaVine said after Sunday’s historic collapse against the Brooklyn Nets. “So we’ve got to figure out a way to get out of that.”
It’s clear that change will come — and that it will start with LaVine. But none of this will happen as quickly as Bulls fans want since reports first surfaced that LaVine is interested in a trade.
The window to begin trades technically opens in mid-December, when the majority of players signed in the offseason become trade-eligible. But that doesn’t mean the Bulls will make a deal anytime soon.
December trades are a tricky pitch in the NBA. Front offices need time to mull over options. This is a leaguewide trend — no team has made a trade in December since 2021. That will be exacerbated by the In-Season Tournament, which encourages front offices to keep their rosters together until they are eliminated.
And it doesn’t help, of course, that LaVine isn’t playing his best basketball, shooting 34.4% from 3-point range and averaging 22.1 points — a 2.7-point drop from last season.
No matter how aggressive Karnišovas chooses to be, it’s most likely the Bulls will move LaVine closer to the Feb. 8 deadline.
What comes after a blockbuster trade is less clear. Although LaVine is a valuable player in the right market, it’s not clear what the Bulls would get in return. And barely two years after acquiring DeRozan as the final piece of their current project, undergoing another rebuild would be a gargantuan process.
At least for now, Karnišovas’ track record doesn’t look promising.
The three-plus years since he took over the executive vice president role in April 2020 have been riddled with more frustration than success. The Bulls have made the playoffs once in his tenure. None of his draft selections have made a meaningful impact. And Karnišovas’ first attempt at a rebuild began to implode the moment the injury to starting point guard Lonzo Ball derailed the roster.
Will this next step be more prosperous? For now, fans will have to delay that answer until the trade deadline — a brutal waiting game that only will get worse if this team continues to shoot poorly and lose games.
