The Chicago Bulls' embattled front office has been called out after yet another bizarrely inactive offseason.
Chicago's summer CV is fairly brief.
The Bulls drafted No. 12 pick Noah Essengue (who's already looking like a pretty raw reach, much the same way Patrick Williams, Dalen Terry and Julian Phillips did) and traded down for the right to draft No. 55 pick Lachlan Olbrich of the NBL's Illawarra Hawks.
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Chicago also flipped the two years and $20 million it owed to 3-and-D point guard Lonzo Ball when it offloaded the veteran in exchange for Cleveland Cavaliers forward Isaac Okoro, who's in just his sixth pro season and — like Williams — presumably has some upside.
Still, it's clear that Cleveland wanted Ball, giving the Bulls the leverage in a theoretical deal. But that would have made too much sense for team president Arturas Karnisovas or general manager Marc Eversley.
Okoro does a lot of the same stuff Williams does, who was selected just a few picks ahead of him in 2020, but is on a far more reasonable contract.
In a recent piece, Tim Bontemps and Kevin Pelton of ESPN try to make sense of the Bulls' relative inactivity and poor asset management.
"In Chicago, the offseason saw the Bulls extend lead front office executives Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley as well as coach Billy Donovan," the ESPN duo notes. "But they've made the playoffs once and have won a single playoff game over the past eight seasons, and have repeatedly failed to extract draft pick value out of trades for veterans (Alex Caruso, DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine) in the past year. One light at the end of the tunnel in Chicago: plenty of cap space next summer."
Is there any guarantee that the Bulls will use that cap space?
Sadly, there is not.
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