Artūras Karnišovas, vice president of basketball operations for the Chicago Bulls for the past five years, is on the record as saying he favours the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons model of team building. That Pistons team was the one with Rasheed Wallace, Ben Wallace, Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince. The one that was really, really good, even if it did lack a traditional “superstar”.
As opposed to the commonplace strategy of selling off veteran players with value, deliberately putting out sub-par teams and receiving high-ceiling infusions of young talent via high lottery picks, the Bulls think they can assemble a competitive team by putting together “nine or ten good players”. They are currently about seven short of that goal, but it is the overt plan.
Certainly, they have avoided the top of the draft. This year, the Bulls will be selecting 12th in the draft, one year after picking 11th, after yet another playoff push that did not amount to anything. But without lottery luck to bail them out, the idea that the Bulls will be able to replicate the Indiana Pacers – who have been able to build a legitimately good title contender without bottoming out – is incredibly ambitious. After all, the Pacers have stars in Pascal Siakam and Tyrese Haliburton.
It appears, though, that this no-superstar policy is negotiable.
Bulls Would Have Traded It All, If They Had Known
Back in February, the Dallas Mavericks made one of the worst trades of all time when they traded 26-year-old superstar Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for 32-year-old no-longer-a-superstar Anthony Davis.
The trade was terrible not just in terms of its outcome, but its process. It was quickly revealed that there was no bidding war – the Mavericks dealt only with the Lakers, in doing so missing out on working up any leverage and getting teams to bid against each other.
If they had done so, the Lakers would have found the entire NBA would have come calling for Luka. And according to Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times, speaking on David Kaplan’s The ReKAP podcast – if the Bulls had been privy to the conversation, they would have let the Lakers name their price:
A source told the Sun-Times that Arturas Karnisovas and his front office would have offered anyone and everyone on the roster had they been notified by the Mavericks that Luka Doncic was available in February.
Neither Is A Good Way To Do Business
The Mavericks’ strategy of negotiating for Anthony Davis and Anthony Davis only seemingly came down to Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison – who has a very long-standing relationship with Davis dating back to his time at Nike – thinking he was a better player than he is. Davis, good though he still is as his mid-thirties approach, is not on Luka’s level, yet if Harrison thought he is, the Mavericks’ position makes more sense. And it is hard if not impossible for anyone else to come between personal bias like that.
According to Cowley, however, the Bulls would have tried. Their best hypothetical offer – something in the region of Coby White, Matas Buzelis, Alex Caruso (still a Bull at that time), Ayo Dosunmu and whichever draft picks the Mavericks would have wanted still would not have moved the needle in a league-wide bidding war. But for Doncic, at least, they would have blown up the Pacers pipe dream and started with a star,
The missed non-opportunity, though, speaks to the problems the Bulls currently face. Having won 40. 39 and 39 games over the last three seasons respectively, and failing to make it beyond the first round of the playoffs since the Tom Thibodeau era, plans to replicate the 2025 Pacers or the 2004 Pistons are an extremely long way off. And any chance of course-correcting to the more conventional star-based model is not likely to happen. They do not have the draft picks, they do not have the trade assets for it – and more importantly, they do not have the chance.
