Bulls lead front office executive Bryson Graham may have gone to a big football school for college, but he chose to work in the middle of a busy NCAA college football Saturday to hammer out a decisive, and perhaps surprising, trade after the Bulls already announced their finalized 2026-27 training camp roster, two days before the 2026 Bulls media day.
In exchanging guards of different age brackets and skill sets in the swap of Rob Dillingham for Buddy Hield, the Graham-led Bulls front office regime ushered in a stark departure from its predecessor Bulls front office.
Bryson Graham executed a player trade to actively improve a roster deficiency and also remove a player from the roster that frankly aligned with the old front office regime’s obsession with effectively re-drafting castoff former lottery picks like Josh Giddey, Jaden Ivey, and Isaac Okoro.
With Dillingham’s departure from the Bulls on the books, there’s no time like the present for Graham to keep up his momentum and continue turning over his roster to prune Karnisovas-era roster holdovers who are largely inconsequential to the future of the Bulls rebuild, which starts with Caleb Wilson.
Here are the next three Chicago Bulls players that Bryson Graham should trade ASAP.
Isaac Okoro
Speaking of Okoro, deal him at the earliest convenience. Karnisovas’ last offseason maneuver of his Bulls tenure was a superfluous 2025 NBA offseason trade of Lonzo Ball to the Cleveland Cavaliers, who would have been a better trade chip in a Bulls trade during the 2025 NBA trade deadline.
Instead, Ball was the fodder that led to Okoro as a trade return to the Bulls. The six-year NBA forward was oversold by Karnisovas as a catalyst to ignite a Bulls cultural revolution towards defense and physicality.
What Okoro's presence contributed to in terms of Bulls team results during the 2025-26 NBA season was a bottom-tier Bulls defense that couldn’t get a stop if it was Hammertime. In true Karnisovas fashion, Okoro also had the nightly honor of being offensive spacing poison, as no NBA defense ever prioritized closing out his jumpshots. It is beyond time to cut bait on Okoro.
Noa Essengue
This is less about Essengue and more about the Bulls' organizational posture toward him since his rough stretch of games during the 2026 summer league exhibition in Las Vegas. Benching a guy in summer league is a strong enough message. Yet the Bulls haven’t let a dubious benching be enough of a consequence for their French forward.
Instead, a public spectacle of reporting leaks trashing Essengue has been a hallmark of the Bulls’ post-Las Vegas stretch of the NBA offseason. Enough is enough. Let Essengue find his basketball way somewhere else that isn’t Chicago.
Leonard Miller
Some Bulls fans enjoyed Miller’s post-2026 NBA trade deadline performances. Honestly, there might be untapped potential in Miller’s game, and frankly, that is something the Bulls should cash in now and not wait around to figure out.
The only untapped potential that matters on the Bulls roster is Caleb Wilson, and Bryson Graham should be aggressively building a roster that maximizes Wilson’s potential as opposed to giving flyer minutes to an Arturas Karnisovas archetype wing.
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