Artūras Karnišovas has a Plan, All it’s Missing is a lot of Luck

The Bulls find themselves in a familiar position heading into this year's offseason.

If the Chicago Bulls actually want to win, they have a funny way of showing it.

Fresh off their third-straight losing season, their seventh in the past nine years, the Bulls find themselves in a hell of their own making: too good to be in position to select one of the summer’s best prospects, but not good enough to play through the spring. To wit, no team has fewer combined playoff victories and top-five draft selections (4) since 2016. 

That figure could change in the draft lottery on May 12 if the Bulls, who are projected to pick 12th, move into the top four or really hit the jackpot and walk away with the first-overall pick despite having only a 1.7% chance of doing so — like they did 17 years ago, when they jumped eight spots and drafted Derrick Rose.

But that’s kind of the point.

Because Artūras Karnišovas has convinced himself that stocking a roster with players other front offices have deemed expendable is the shortest route between irrelevancy and supremacy, the Bulls need dumb luck now more than ever.

“That’s the goal, shrinking the timeline. Basically, to have a faster turnaround,” the executive vice president of basketball operations said at his end-of-season media availability a week ago. “But I think there’s a lot to like about this young roster. I think they’ve showed it the second half of the season.”

Like he proved two end-of-season press conferences ago, Karnišovas never met a small-sample size he couldn’t run with. So, naturally, he trumpeted the Bulls winning 15 of their final 20 regular-season games.

The context he was well within his rights to ignore, however, is seven of those wins coming at the expense of teams that didn’t even qualify for the play-in portion of the postseason, with another four coming against teams that either rested their best players or were on the second night of a back-to-back.

“It’s hard to win games in this league,” Karnišovas managed to say with a straight face about a time of year when competitive integrity was arguably at its worst, “and to finish 15-5 — yeah, it’s not a victory lap, but there’s some positives and I think we’ve got to keep on building on this group.”

Between his presumed intention to retain Josh Giddey, his first- and second-round draft picks this summer and the dozen players he already has under contract for next season, Karnišovas doesn’t have much choice. Hence, his plea to fans.

“I’m asking fans for patience because we’re in the first year of that transition.”

The irony here is that Karnišovas, having already acknowledged he rushed his process four years ago, is attempting to cut corners yet again, all while he watches a venue that’s about to go a decade without seeing a playoff win repeatedly house the league’s largest average attendance.

It’s a wonder president and chief operating officer Michael Reinsdorf has entrusted him with a second rebuild, really.

Karnišovas’s fifth season on the job ended at the hands of the Miami Heat, just like the one before that and the one before that did. With 195 wins against 205 losses, his record pales in comparison to most of his recent predecessors. 

Still, it seems his seat is room temperature, at best.

It’s almost like winning isn’t a top priority.