We’ve talked a lot about what the Chicago Bulls players need to do next season.
Zach LaVine and Lonzo Ball need to show they can stay healthy. Nikola Vucevic has to show he can still shoot. Patrick Williams needs to improve at anything and prove the Bulls didn’t make a poor investment. Coby White and Josh Giddey need to show they can step up in bigger roles.
But it won’t just be the players who are under pressure for the Bulls next season, as they have a coach and front office who are officially on the hot seat.
ESPN named both Billy Donovan and Arturas Karnisovas as coaches and executives with the most to prove next season and both of them will be under heavy scrutiny.
The Billy Donovan firing is inevitable
We wrote about the inevitability of a breakup between the Bulls and Donovan, mostly because he is not the right coach to lead a rebuild.
But you could also point to his losing record with the Bulls and his lack of any success in the playoffs as reasons to let him go even though you certainly can’t put all of the losing on him.
Donovan has been failed by the front office as well as handed some bad injury luck, but coaches are usually the first to be scapegoated when things go wrong and plenty has gone wrong for the Bulls.
They may choose a different voice to lead the next era, though the Bulls have supported Donovan so far.
Arturas Karnisovas
Where do you start?
Karnisovas has not been the savior many fans thought he would be and many would argue that the Bulls need to clean house in the front office.
You can point to the Bulls lack of wins, their lack of identity or to the many bad trades Karnisovas has made over the years.
Like Donovan, this isn’t all on Karnisovas, as he is hamstrung by a cheap front office that won’t go into the luxury tax but still expects to make the playoffs every year. Karnisovas has always publicly been against a full rebuild, but you have to wonder how he feels in private.
If the Bulls are rebuilding, there are questions as to whether he should be the one doing it, as his halfway approach has left the Bulls in a bad spot with no clear way out.
If the Bulls are truly interested in rebuilding their franchise, they might have to start with a clean slate, which would mean a new front office and coaching staff.
It’s hard to see that happening given Reinsdorf’s reluctance to pay people not to work, so this may have to play out to its inevitable ugly conclusion.