Chicago Bulls: John Paxson has to go if front office changes are made

Sweeping changes need to happen for the Chicago Bulls up in the front office, and it all starts with vice president of basketball operations John Paxson.

There’s a key move that the Chicago Bulls need to make if they’re going to completely shakeup the front office and reshape the coaching staff heading into the 2020 offseason.

The report that the Bulls could be changing up their front office by at least reassigning general manager Gar Forman is good to hear, but not near enough. Forman has to go to win back a lot of the respect this organization needs to compete to land the top free agents around the NBA in the summer of 2021, and to get more trade targets that actually want to play in the Windy City.

ESPN NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski confirmed reports over All-Star Weekend that Bulls president Michael Reinsdorf was looking into the early stages of making changes in the front office.

GarPax encompasses one of the less function front office pairings in the NBA over the course of the last decade. And the rest of the NBA knows that.

Gar’s reputation might be worse than Paxson’s around the NBA, but not by a huge margin. Paxson still doesn’t handle the media well, constructed a poor team at hand right now, and hired maybe the worst head coach in the NBA. Boylen’s antics reflect the dysfunction that lies in this Bulls front office quite well.

Repairing the reputation of this Bulls organization does start with making changes from the top down. The Reinsdorfs need to have enough respect within their own organization to be able to let go of the people in management that caused this dumpster fire of a rebuild to occur in the first place (hence GarPax and Boylen).

Boylen is not a very good head coach, and it will not hold this franchise back in the slightest to move on from him. GarPax definitely makeup one of the worst front offices in the NBA.

Whether it be looking into the Bulls reputation around the NBA during All-Star Weekend or diving deeper into the team’s numbers of late, there’s a lot of proof that this front office and coaching staff are among the worst in the league.

Clutchpoints ranked out all 30 owners in the NBA worst-to-first last year, and Jerry Reinsdorf rang in at 25th on the list.

Sportscasting did a list last year of the five worst front offices in the NBA, and the Bulls ranked fourth.

Boylen’s record as interim and head coach with the Bulls is 36-77. He has one win this season over a team with a .500 record or better. Somehow he beat Paul George and the Los Angeles Clippers at home back in December.

The days of Boylen’s antics as a basketball coach dates back to his days with the Utah Utes. College basketball media with a smaller program out in the PAC-12 like Utah doesn’t get the national media exposure like the Bulls do, but his weird sayings were happening back then too.

Even in the third year of this rebuild, the Bulls aren’t really going anywhere. Medium’s HOPE rankings that they released last summer described the Bulls situation pretty well. They put the Bulls in a tier of teams that included the Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks, and Phoenix Suns in terms of how delusional each fan base would be to think their team will be a title contender anytime soon.

To put that in perspective, the Orlando Magic, Minnesota Timberwolves, and Sacramento Kings all ranked higher on Medium than the Bulls did.

The point here is that the Bulls need to move on from a lot of faces that were holding back this franchise for a long time. GarPax created the most dysfunction for the longest amount of time, including seeing poor exists out for 2010’s Bulls stars like Jimmy Butler, Joakim Noah, and Derrick Rose.

Moreover, get rid of Paxson and the Bulls are also likely rid of Forman and Boylen. Paxson might be the root evil cause of all the Bulls dysfunction over the last four or five years. He’s the one still making a lot of the personnel decisions with this organization, not Gar. Let him go and all the other problematic people in the franchise could be gone too.