On Tuesday, Michael Scotto of HoopsHype reported the Chicago Bulls intend to add three additional assistant coaches to their coaching staff: Blake Ahearn, Jonah Herscu, and Rex Kalamian.
Sources: The Chicago Bulls will add Rex Kalamian, Jonah Herscu, and Blake Ahearn as assistant coaches.
— Michael Scotto (@MikeAScotto) July 14, 2026
Kalamian was an assistant coach for the Bucks, Pistons, Kings, Clippers, Raptors, Thunder, Timberwolves, and Nuggets.
Herscu was Portland’s G League head coach and assistant… pic.twitter.com/SpkTMP6FbE
All three coaching hires have well-defined NBA player development track records, so their additions to Bulls head coach Tiago Splitter’s staff solidify a Bulls coaching identity heavily indexed towards player development for the 2026-27 NBA season.
Jonah Herscu is perhaps the least surprising name among the new hires expected to join Splitter’s staff. Herscu, like Splitter, will join the Bulls after finishing the 2025-26 NBA season in the Portland Trail Blazers organization.
Additionally, Herscu also served as the head coach of the Trail Blazers' NBA G League affiliate, Rip City Remix. Also noteworthy, Herscu has previous Chicago basketball history with both the Bulls as a video coordinator from 2013 to 2015 and the WNBA’s Chicago Sky as an assistant coach for the 2016 season.
Presumably, besides Herscu having an established relationship with Splitter, there’s also a prior basketball relationship influence with current Bulls senior adviser, basketball operations, and former Bulls executive vice president, basketball operations, John Paxson.
Rex Kalamian is the longest-tenured NBA coach among the three coaching staff hires, having served continuously in NBA organizations since 1992.
Kalamian’s notable NBA assistant coach stop in his career, as it relates to the Bulls, is likely his stint as a Toronto Raptors assistant coach from 2015 to 2018, which coincided with the successful run of the Raptors’ NBA G League affiliate, Raptors 905, capturing the 2017 NBA G League championship, in addition to two conference titles in 2017 and 2018.
Blake Ahearn, coincidentally, followed Kalaminan’s NBA G League championship success, winning his own NBA G League championship in 2018 as the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs affiliate, Austin Spurs.
Considering Splitter’s own history with the Spurs, it is also not surprising that he would add a coach that covers both player development and Spurs culture bases in their NBA coaching career.
Rationalizing Splitter’s coaching staff
Ideally, Tiago Splitter should have been given free rein to build out his Bulls staff from scratch at the beginning of a rebuild.
But we’re talking about the Chicago Bulls, who frequently believe in using corporate America-style succession planning to fill their basketball operations roles from the inside, instead of consistently fielding competitive searches to bring in outsider staff to fill their coaching and front office roles when the opportunity arises.
The entirety of former Bulls head coach Billy Donovan’s coaching staff, Wes Unseld Jr., Dan Craig, John Bryant, Billy Schmidt, Damian Cotter, Henry Domercant, is expected to remain on current Bulls head coach Tiago Splitter’s staff, and in that regard, adding three additional coaching staff hires is likely Splitter’s attempt at placing his fingerprint on the identity of his staff for the 2026-27 NBA season.
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