When Jerry Reinsdorf bought the Bulls in 1985, he installed future Hall-of-Famer Jerry Krause as the team’s general manager. Forty-one years later, he will have to make his fourth hire.
The Reinsdorfs are for the most part hands-off owners. In order to get fired, it’s not enough to be bad, or even the worst among your peers. As long as the Bulls aren’t national laughingstocks, the job is safe.
Arturas Karnisovas fell below that bar, finally getting a well-overdue axe on Monday afternoon. His tenure will mostly be remembered for being inconceivably worse than his predecessors, who had fans paying for billboards calling for their dismissal by the time they were let go.
When Karnisovas was first hired, he had the allure of being part of the scouting group that found Nikola Jokic. Also, most importantly for Bulls fans, he was not Gar Forman or John Paxson.
It turns out that having Jokic No. 41 on your board isn’t as much of a bulletproof resume as team president Michael Reinsdorf might have thought.
MORE: SN’s post-March Madness NBA Mock Draft
Karnisovas never lived up to that sharp scouting reputation. In reality, he was an exceptionally poor evaluator of talent. In his first draft, he selected Patrick Williams at No. 4, above future All-Stars such as Deni Avdija, Tyrese Haliburton, and Tyrese Maxey. He wasted his next first-round selection on Dalen Terry, who was waived after the Bulls traded him earlier this season. He finally seemed to have a hit when the best player available in Matas Buzelis fell to him in 2024. Buzelis is a nice prospect, but not one that has been good enough to save his job.
There was no rhyme or reason to Karnisovas’ draft strategy in the second round. He made possibly the best value pick of his career at No. 38 with Ayo Dosunmu. He later deemed those picks worthless when he was getting penalized one for tampering during the Lonzo Ball trade, or trading two of them to strike out on busted prospect Julian Phillips, or throwing them in to every other trade that he made.
Karnisovas pivoted to treating those picks like a valued asset after it was all he could get for his veterans. And he made no mention of their value after he lost another one by failing to disclose Coby White’s medical condition to the Hornets during this past trade deadline.
Worse than the poor drafting eye was his pro personnel scouting. It was obvious even to this amateur scout that Williams was not worth retaining after his rookie deal. Instead, Karnisovas gave him $90 million and a guaranteed five years to become one of the worst contracts in the league.
Karnisovas continued to value continuity, keeping his own players rather than trying to bring in free agents. He put forth a plan to be like the Pacers, winning with nine or 10 good players. The Bulls were only nine or 10 guys short of that happening.
There is one last way outside of drafting and free agency to shape a team, and it was his weakest of all. Trades involving his peers were where Karnisovas looked the most overmatched. He was doomed from the start after he exchanged two draft picks and Wendell Carter Jr. for Nikola Vucevic, a defensively-challenged center whose limitations made it extremely difficult to achieve high-level success around him.
To his credit, Karnisovas did temporarily find the right mix, adding in DeMar DeRozan, Lonzo Ball, and Alex Caruso and getting the Bulls to No. 1 in the East by the 2022 All-Star break. That foundation was built on toothpicks though, and it quickly fell apart.
Karnisovas seemed paralyzed after that initial misstep, failing to make a trade at the deadline for three straight years. He held onto all of his players for way too long, backing out of good deals in order to move them later when their value was at their lowest.
Four years ago, the Bulls were in first place in the East. AK traded away the entire top 6 from that roster, all of them too late.
The only first round pick he received was the team’s own in 2025, in exchange for DeRozan, LaVine, Ball, Vooch, Caruso, and Coby White.
— Steph Noh (@StephNoh) February 4, 2026
All of these failed trades led to the Bulls turning into a punchline, and not just among fans and media. League executives felt the same way.
Last year in an appearance on The Athletic NBA Daily podcast, Sam Amick shared what he had heard while he conducted his league-wide poll of the best front offices in the league. The Bulls were mentioned unprompted as one of the worst by their peers.
“Right now, the reactions to their choices are just wildly negative across the league, where Chicago would come up time and again with people throwing them in their bottom five,” Amick said. “It’s not just media slander, it’s real stuff within the league industry.”
The Karnisovas firing was way overdue. But as poorly as this team has been run, there is a golden opportunity for whoever comes next. The Bulls will have at least one good pick in a strong draft, possibly two if the Blazers make the playoffs. They have a projected league-high $65 million in cap space to reshape their roster, according to ESPN’s Bobby Marks. Buzelis and Josh Giddey are solid young pieces with positive value. And they have all of their first-round picks going forward. There’s a clean slate for whoever comes next.
Most importantly, the Bulls have the best fanbase in the NBA. They lead the NBA in attendance in most years, including this one. And when the team is good, as they briefly showed during a fluky 5-0 start to the season, the arena is rocking. Bulls fans are starved for anything positive to root for.
The Reindsorfs will have to nail this next hire. They shouldn’t inspire much faith given how poor they were at evaluating Karnisovas. But it would be difficult to hire anyone worse.