A good relationship brewing between the new Chicago Bulls front office personnel and head coach Jim Boylen might not be great news.
The storyline that is going to be put most heavily under the microscope at the moment in the Chicago Bulls camp as the 2020 offseason emerges is what will be done with current head coach Jim Boylen. Since the Bulls brought aboard a new-look front office regime, a lot of the other executive personnel were shifted. And it looked like swift changes might be coming for the coaching staff too.
Or at least that’s what a lot of the fans in the Windy City had to hope was going to happen after all of the front office changes.
In the front office, the Reinsdorfs made the move to replace former vice president of basketball operations John Paxson with ex-Denver Nuggets general manager Arturas Karnisovas. The official title for Karnisovas with the Bulls is set to be executive vice president of basketball operations. Essentially he replaces Paxson as the lead voice in the front office.
Then Karnisovas replaced former general manager Gar Forman with the former Philadelphia 76ers vice president of player personnel Marc Eversley. The hirings of Karnisovas and Eversley were met with pretty raucous approval from the fans, but the response came with an asterisk.
The job for the rebuild heading into the fourth year of the rebuild is far from over. They need to make some level of changes to the coaching staff it seems to find a better direction for the rebuild. And the roster construction could use some work too. At least the front office has a long offseason to get all of this done.
But there are mixed messages coming from various reports about the job security of Boylen at this point in time. A report that emerged from Jamal Collier of the Chicago Tribune on July 17 stating that the relationship might actually be going better than most of the fans in the Windy City anticipated by now.
Here’s more on what this report had to say on the matter of Boylen’s relationship with Eversley and Karnisovas by now.
"“The relationship has gone really well,” Boylen told WOOD-TV at a “Unity in the Community” event in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich. “We communicate every day. I think they understand where we were, what we’re trying to get to. They’ve been very supportive and collaborative. It’s a process to build this team into what it can be.“I just like the fact that we have a relationship already. It’s never perfect. Nothing’s perfect. You just work at it. Tell the truth. You get your guys to play hard. That’s what we’re trying to do.”"
Either way you look at it, the feeling is that Karnisovas is going to take a more patient approach with the coaching search. But the heat isn’t coming on too strong to Boylen’s seat at the moment. We’ll have to follow this ongoing storyline heading further into the summer months this offseason.
Boylen pushed the Bulls to finish up with a record of 22-43 through 65 games prior to the novel coronavirus pandemic-induced season hiatus back in mid-March. That was actually a step back from where the Bulls started the rebuild out at during the 2017-18 season.