SACRAMENTO — Josh Giddey slammed his hands together as the ball clattered through the net and onto the hardwood, his face crumpling into a grimace.
Disgust and frustration melded together in the guard’s voice as he shouted at his teammates. The outburst was short. Giddey didn’t have time to linger on the play, a blown coverage that allowed Sacramento Kings guard Killian Hayes a clear pathway to cut to the basket for a layup. There were still more than seven minutes left in the game. The guard gathered up the ball, inbounding a pass to make another fruitless attempt to chip away at a double-digit deficit.
In most ways that matter, Sunday’s 126-110 loss to the Kings reflected the overall despair of Chicago’s current situation. Giddey tallied his ninth triple-double of the season. Collin Sexton sank seven 3-pointers to score 28 points. Neither fact meant much in the face of porous defense, ineffective rim defense and a lack of effort on the offensive boards.
It wasn’t bad enough that the Bulls couldn’t beat the worst team in the entire NBA. Or that this 14-win failure of a roster cruised to the victory without the familiar faces of Zach LaVine (sidelined for the season) and DeMar DeRozan (illness). The glaring concern for the Bulls is that Sunday’s loss didn’t seem all that purposeful or planned.
This is, of course, the outcome the Bulls desired. They won’t admit it. Front office executives won’t even say the word “rebuild” too loudly around the United Center. Nevertheless, this franchise set one goal at the trade deadline: establish the best possible pick in the 2026 draft to begin improving a roster severely lacking in talent.
So why doesn’t this team look like it’s tanking?
Chicago Bulls forward Jalen Smith and Sacramento Kings guard Nique Clifford go for a loose ball during the second half on Sunday, March 8, 2026, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Alan Greth)
The Bulls refuse to shut down center Jalen Smith, who returned to the lineup in a restricted capacity after yet another hiatus due to a calf injury. They won’t play guard Rob Dillingham, a young player under contract next season who needs reps to improve. They insist upon starting forward Guerschon Yabusele, a 30-year-old who doesn’t fit any aspect of the team’s future profile. All of these decisions are made under the pretense of prioritizing wins.
It is through these practices that the Bulls accidentally picked up wins against the Milwaukee Bucks and Phoenix Suns this week, a pair of victories that were egregious for vastly different reasons. Against the Bucks, the Bulls needed a loss to retain an advantage in the draft lottery. Against the Suns, the Bulls had a straightforward opportunity to fold to a team genuinely trying to move up the Western Conference standings; instead, they put on their scrappiest performance of the season, capped off with a heady time-wasting play from Tre Jones.
This has been predictable to anyone who has actually listened to Bulls leadership in recent weeks. Executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas doesn’t have the proverbial strong stomach necessary to guide a team out of mediocrity. He gets queasy any time the Bulls need to make a hard decision — trade a popular player, lose a few games, commit to a strategy — in order to improve. This inclination to nausea means that Karnišovas outright refuses to direct coach Billy Donovan to take any tanking measures despite clearing the way for this strategy at the trade deadline.
“Everything I’ve gotten here from the front office, from ownership is that we need to do the best job you can to go out there and compete and to try to win,” Donovan said in February. “I believe in that. … That’s kind of the mentality that we have here inside the organization. We’ve always tried to keep the integrity of that anytime we go out and compete.”
The Bulls never wavered from that ethos. That might not have seemed obvious during their 11-game losing streak, the worst in franchise history since 2001. Yet this compulsive desire to win bleeds into every aspect of the team’s management, perhaps best evidenced by the fact that Giddey and Matas Buzelis remained on the court until the final 80 seconds of play despite still being fresh off a pair of ankle sprains.
Maybe this stubbornness won’t affect anything at all. The Bulls are currently ninth in the draft order with a 26-38 record. The Bucks dropped a Sunday night loss as well, keeping Chicago ahead of their closest Eastern Conference foe by a 1 1/2 game margin.
But weighting the draft odds is a delicate business — and one that the Bulls remain committed to approaching with a clumsy commitment to competitiveness.