Raise your hand if you had a passive-aggressive Noa Essengue soap opera in your Chicago Bulls 2026 NBA offseason predictions. No? Yes? Well, that’s where we are friends.
For the uninitiated, Essengue played average to bad basketball on the Bulls’ 2026 summer league roster. The consequence of Essengue’s performance manifested in a dubious benching for the remainder of the Bulls summer league games after the first half of the Bulls second summer league game against the Utah Jazz.
A reasonable basketball organization would call it a day in terms of sending a message to Essengue after an embarrassing demotion in a non-consequential stretch of glorified pick-up games in Las Vegas.
Despite all the fanfare surrounding the new Chicago Bulls front office staff, led by lead front office decision-maker Bryson Graham, and new Bulls head coach Tiago Splitter, the legacy Bulls organizational culture of locker room dysfunction already is primed for another season of public display.
Inexplicably, the Bulls relayed a report to the Chicago Sun-Times’ Joe Cowley that the Bulls coaching staff is ‘annoyed’ with Essengue’s perceived in-game complaints to referees. (Clip Warning: NSFW language)
The Bulls’ exit strategy for moving on from Essengue should have been simple AND QUIET if that is what the Bulls’ front office and coaching staff desire.
Instead, the Bulls’ braintrust reporting to Cowley is positioning the franchise to be perceived as a petty NBA basketball organization that has already destroyed any possibility of trading Essengue to at least turn him into something of value to their rebuild.
The organizational smoke is wafting
From The Last Dance documentary chronicling the end of the Bulls' six-title 1990s championship dynasty, to Carmelo Anthony avoiding the rumored dysfunction of the Bulls in 2014, to a tense relationship between former Bulls guard Zach LaVine and then-Bulls lead front office executive Arturas Karnisovas, unproductive relationship dynamics between the organization and their players or coaches are the Bulls' strongest legacy besides six NBA championships.
The common denominator through the three front office generations of the Chicago Bulls is the franchise’s majority ownership - the Reinsdorf family.
If Michael Reinsdorf’s aim in hiring Bryson Graham to run his franchise’s basketball operations is to ultimately ensure the direction of his franchise can “get right”, then he must take responsibility and keep Noa Essengue’s name out of media leaks and scrutinize why and how these leaks occurred.
Otherwise, Reinsdorf tacitly approves of his franchise continuing to wallow in dysfunction that will continue to be off-putting to elite NBA talent when considering if the Bulls are the right franchise for their career.
Not only is the NBA a players' league, but the NBA is also ultimately a superstar league. NBA superstars want to play for an organization that does good business with players and doesn’t make a media mockery of the players on their roster.
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