Have the Bulls Let Flexibility Turn into Stagnation with the Trade Deadline Looming?
- Drew Stevens (@Drew_H_Stevens)
- 14 minutes ago
- 2 min read
At times, patience can signal confidence. At others, it can signal avoidance.
With the Chicago Bulls, the difference has slowly come into focus.
Artūras Karnišovas has asked fans for patience while simultaneously selling them on the flexibility that comes with having seven expiring contracts on the books.
But patience only works if it leads somewhere.
Expiring contracts can spell optionality. Standing pat can signal discipline.
Karnišovas fashions himself a long-term thinker. His track record says otherwise.
Holding onto expiring contracts only makes sense if there’s a clear pathway to improvement. That means using cap space as a weapon, having free agency offer real options, and finding talent capable of altering trajectories instead of preserving the status quo.
None of that describes the Bulls’ reality.
The idea that flexibility alone can drive progress ignores history and a free-agent market that couldn’t care less about the third-largest city in the country without a star to sell it or any evidence that the Bulls truly aspire to win at the highest level.
Karnišovas bought into a stretch of games last season that were barely worth the pixels they occupied. He’s lost leverage ever since. Injuries to key rotation players in the final year of their deals have only made matters worse.
The real concern isn’t losing Coby White, or Zach Collins, or Nikola Vuċević, or Ayo Dosunmu, or Kevin Huerter for nothing.
It's that they won’t lose them at all.
Selling high on Tre Jones and Jalen Smith, both of whom have outperformed their meager contracts, seems beyond Karnišovas.
He can sell re-signing his own players as stability and frame modest external additions as progress. The roster shifts just enough for him to feign optimism — without changing enough to challenge prior evaluations.
It’s a trap the executive vice president of basketball operations has fallen into before.
Karnišovas has participated in just two trade deadlines in five seasons — and in both cases never acted before the final days.
Flexibility becomes familiarity. Optionality becomes inertia. The team is never bad enough to reset, never good enough to contend, and always close enough to fool itself that one more adjustment will do the trick.
Patience can be a virtue. It can also be a crutch.
The question for the Bulls is whether patience moves them forward or keeps them running in place.