Before we have an actual orange basketball officially tip off, not only the start of the 2026-27 Chicago Bulls preseason, but also the official on-court start of the Bryson Graham era of the Bulls’ front office, it is worth Bulls fans reflecting on a nuanced detail in Graham’s predecessor Bulls front office.
To be clear, the consensus young player success stories that Graham inherited from his predecessor are forward Matas Buzelis and guard Josh Giddey.
The choices that Graham’s predecessor, Arturas Karnisovas, made when it came to acquiring NBA players under the age of 25 should be put into a brutally honest context in light of one of his last acquisitions while running the Bulls’ front office, guard Rob Dillingham, being shipped out of Chicago.
Bulls fans' conversation in the wake of Dillingham being traded for guard Buddy Hield morphed into an interesting segmentation of fans who were excited by the trade given Hield’s three-point shooting reputation, while another contingent of Bulls fans made a case for the Bulls giving up on Dillingham’s perceived upside too soon.
Here’s the brutal retrospective honesty about Arturas Karnisovas’ Bulls acquisition of 25-and-under players through trade, draft, or free agency: most of his players had minimal upside to begin with.
At best, Karnisovas’ lack of intention in building a serious NBA player development program for his many project players made it all but a certainty that if said players actually had upside, then it would never be realized as long as they were members of the Chicago Bulls.
Hopefully Bryson Graham doesn’t repeat history
This point of reflection isn’t just about forward Patrick Williams. The fatal front-office execution behind not only Williams’ draft selection but also the immovable object that is the remainder of his five-year, $90 million rookie extension is well documented.
There’s also perhaps the first real signal that Karnisovas was one-dimensional in his view of NBA player upside when he acquired Troy Brown Jr. during the 2020-21 NBA season in a three-team trade between the Bulls, Boston Celtics, and Washington Wizards, in which a player with legitimate upside was traded away from the Bulls in Daniel Gafford.
The most egregious Karnisovas player acquisitions that, in retrospect, were nowhere in the ballpark of NBA upside were toolsy, non-shooting wings, Dalen Terry and Julian Phillips. We could talk about Marko Simonovic or Onuralp Bitim as hypothetical mysterious European diamonds in the rough, but they quickly settled into lava rocks in the raw.
Sometimes there are simply bad young players who find their way into the NBA, and unfortunately, Arturas Karnisovas was exceptional at finding those kinds of basketball players. In some ways, Bryson Graham's job is pretty simple: be a better NBA talent evaluator than Arturas Karnisovas.
Valuable NBA upside of any degree makes itself obvious in the first two to three NBA seasons of an NBA player's career, like Matas Buzelis, Ayo Dosunmu, and, hopefully, the only upside on the Bulls roster that really matters, Caleb Wilson.
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