The Bulls Finally Moved. The Question Is Where They're Going.

Artūras Karnišovas at Bulls Media Day 2025 (Destiny Little/The Bigs Archives)

For years, the Chicago Bulls have been trapped in a holding pattern of waiting and reacting.

Transactional periods came and went. Patience was treated as a strategy rather than a tool. And each season ended in the same place — competitive enough to justify waiting, stagnant enough to make waiting costly.

This week, Artūras Karnišovas finally moved.

Seven trades. Eight players in. Nine second-round picks added. Starters shipped out. Rotation pieces gone. A roster no longer constructed to sprint toward the play-in with conviction, but one designed to slow down, evaluate, and quietly slide toward the draft.

After multiple trade deadlines of inaction, seeing Karnišovas finally put his title to use was a relief.

He now has the tools he’s long claimed to value — but flexibility isn’t the same as leverage, and once the deadline passed, that distinction became unavoidable.

And at first, the moves deserved more than polite acknowledgment.

The opening sequence was sharp. 

Turning Dario Šarić’s expiring contract into two second-round picks was efficient asset management. Using Šarić and Kevin Huerter to take a swing on Jaden Ivey was the kind of calculated risk the Bulls have too often avoided. Leveraging Boston’s need for size and financial relief to flip Nikola Vučević into Anfernee Simons was opportunistic and well-timed.

Those deals weren’t franchise-altering, but they were coherent. They created flexibility, added optionality, and suggested an organization finally willing to cooperate with the market rather than fight it.

Golf claps were warranted.

They just didn’t last.

Because the moves that followed dulled the impact of the ones that came before — not by accident, but by contradiction.

Shipping Coby White to Charlotte, a direct competitor for the final play-in spot, completed the pivot away from this season. But it also invited a backcourt logjam of similarly styled guards — Ivey, Simons, and Collin Sexton — none of whom are as fit for the role they’ll be asked to fill as the player they replaced.

Moving White at this stage — rather than earlier, when leverage was higher — fits a familiar pattern. 

The Bulls didn’t lose an asset. They waited until its value flattened.

The same tension surfaced elsewhere. 

Trading 23-year-old Dalen Terry for 30-year-old Guerschon Yabusele addressed positional imbalance, but not trajectory. 

Sending Ayo Dosunmu, in the middle of a career year, to Minnesota for a package headlined by Rob Dillingham added youth without certainty and upside without insulation.

Taken individually, the moves are uneven. Collectively, they blur the message.

The Bulls have real flexibility — not theoretical, not aspirational. Expiring contracts and draft capital, the kind of tools Karnišovas highlighted after the deadline.

That distinction matters, because it reframes the criticism.

The issue hasn’t been that Karnišovas values flexibility too highly. It’s that he has routinely waited too long to create it. 

Again and again, the Bulls have held onto players past the point of maximum leverage — allowing contracts to age, markets to cool, and urgency to dissipate — until flexibility became a necessity rather than an advantage. 

Optionality didn’t disappear. Its value did.

With the season locked in, the Bulls are now tethered to players like Simons and Sexton — useful, but overlapping guards who don’t project as long-term answers. 

Whatever leverage might have existed at the deadline is now replaced by patience and circumstance.

At best, the Bulls gain cap space — useful, but circumstantial, entirely dependent on context. The upcoming unrestricted free-agent class offers limited upside, and the restricted market is unlikely to function as a reliable talent pipeline. 

Flexibility, in this case, creates room, not momentum.

By waiting to move, the Bulls preserved options but quietly surrendered control over how impactful those options could be.

The Bulls have too often learned that distinction after the window has already narrowed.

Yes, they finally moved — but they still haven’t shown they can move on time.