#1: Trading for Nikola Vucevic
The Bulls have three players in Zach LaVine, Lonzo Ball and Nikola Vucevic who they would love to trade this summer, but good luck finding any takers.
Here’s a hypothetical for you: Would you rather have Franz Wagner, Jett Howard, Wendell Carter Jr and Otto Porter or Nikola Vucevic?
The answer is obvious, but that’s essentially the choice the Bulls made when they traded for the All-Star center Vucevic. Look, Vucevic is good, but the Bulls had a chance to add elite young talent to their roster in a very good draft and instead elected to try and “go for it” with the “it” in this case being building a team that will never win more than 40 games.
Meanwhile, Orlando was a playoff team this season, is brimming with young talent, Wagner is a stud, and they are only going to get better, while the Bulls are in the same spot as they were, with no young talent other than Coby White, and two more years of Vucevic that they would love to trade.
Gafford, Derrick Jones Jr, Lauri Markkanen and Franz Wagner are all better fits for the modern NBA and guys the Bulls could have gone to war with around LaVine and DeRozan.
Possibly the worst part of the Karnisovas era is that he has done next to nothing since these moves, allowing his team to get in a spot where they could lose their best player for nothing in free agency or have to overpay to keep him on a roster that has few ways of getting better without just tearing it down and starting over.