Artūras Karnišovas, four years into his role as the vice president of basketball operations for the Chicago Bulls, still isn’t changing his messaging.
The Bulls enter this season still carrying the sour taste of missing the playoffs via the play-in tournament for two consecutive years — and the weight of an impending draft pick that hinges on another cycle of loss.
The Bulls owe a top-10 protected draft pick to the San Antonio Spurs as the final piece of the 2020 deal for DeMar DeRozan. So if the team doesn’t finish in the bottom third of the league, they will sacrifice a lottery pick in the 2025 NBA draft that’s stocked with talent.
But Karnišovas did not signal any immediate urgency to tank, reiterating his boilerplate messaging of competitiveness during an interview alongside coach Billy Donovan on WSCR-AM 670 Wednesday morning.
“We’re going to try to win every game,” Karnišovas said. “The only way you can teach those guys how to win games is going through that.”
This is not functionally informative, given that the Bulls have (allegedly) been attempting to win every game for three consecutive seasons, the result of which has been one playoff berth, one playoff win and two dismal losing seasons. But it reflected an ongoing hesitancy from the Bulls front office to acknowledge and embrace the realities of undergoing a rebuild.
Even if Karnišovas won’t address it outright, the draft is clearly center-of-mind for the Bulls. He acknowledged the front office will “take it one game at a time in terms of expectations” throughout the season.
But after the team failed to make crucial trade deadline deals for players like Zach LaVine and Alex Caruso last season, it’s unclear whether the Bulls will possess the decisiveness to maneuver without missing out on more potential assets to build around.
That’s not the only question looming for the Bulls ahead of training camp, which begins Monday. Lonzo Ball is expected to rejoin team activities for the first time in two years, another crucial step in a long-delayed recovery from a knee injury first suffered in January 2022.
For the Bulls, the questions surrounding Ball have shifted. It’s no longer a matter of if Ball will return this season. Instead, the Bulls are trying to figure out when, how long and to what level of effectiveness Ball can reclaim his role as a key player in Chicago.
Ball has been 5-on-5 scrimmaging since early August, and both Karnišovas and Donovan seemed cautiously optimistic about his progress. But they are also wary about the prospect of risking another setback by ramping Ball up too quickly or overloading his minutes at all.
Training camp will be the first test of how Ball can withstand the “grind” of daily competition against NBA talent. Even if he passes, the Bulls will keep barriers in place in the hopes of preventing re-injury. That could mean a hard cap on his playing time, which Donovan suggested as ranging anywhere from 18 to 25 minutes per game.
“Lonzo loves to play,” Donovan said on the radio. “And at his age — as much as he loves to play — he wants to play beyond this year. So we also have a responsibility to make sure that he’s in a position where he can play after this season, where it’s not one of these things where it’s not managed correctly or we’re not putting him in a situation to be effective.”
Ball is only the first in a long line of question marks for the Bulls as they weigh a cluttered backcourt heading into this season. Besides returning Ball from injury, the Bulls need to figure out a balance between LaVine, Coby White, Josh Giddey, Ayo Dosunmu and Patrick Williams while also overseeing the development of Dalen Terry, Julian Phillips and Matas Buzelis. The group creates a jumbled vision for the team’s identity.
Donovan clearly knows what to expect on one end of the court — and it’s not positive. After trading away Caruso to acquire Giddey early in the offseason, the Bulls will field a fairly toothless defense this season.
It’s a sizable loss for the Bulls, who relied on a top-5 defense to buoy them in the 2022-23 season before plummeting to 22nd overall in defensive rating last year. Without Caruso as an anchor, Donovan acknowledged that the Bulls will be on the back foot defensively this season.
“It’s going to be a challenge for us,” Donovan said. “We’re going to have to do it by committee. We’re going to have to be creative to cover for each other in certain situations.”
On the other end of the court, the Bulls have at least outlined their hopes for a new offensive identity — a more uptempo system that will attempt to address the way they have failed to line up with the analytical trends of the NBA in recent years, such as 3-point shooting and offensive pace. Donovan emphasized a need to play faster while shaking guards out of the habit of only creating with the ball in their hands.
But the Bulls have said all this before. They entered last season with promises to play faster, to move the ball unselfishly, to shoot more threes. None of those came true.
The team’s leadership is still straddling two possible paths of digging into the current roster or investing in youth development. For instance, Donovan and Karnišovas won’t commit to loading up minutes for young players like Buzelis, who could see G League action this season.
“You’ve got to be able to help a young player with the things that really go into winning and the things that go into being a successful player,” Donovan said. “Is playing time part of it? Sure. Adversity is also a huge part of that. How are they going to respond to tough games, being exposed, not having the experience?”
With a lottery pick, a long-injured player and a slew of young talent all on the line, the Bulls will have more questions than answers as they head into training camp. Fans will have to wait until the season opener against the New Orleans Pelicans on Oct. 23 to determine if this will be the season that begins to provide answers.
