Apparently Bulls Scouts Knew Arturas Karnisovas Was A Fraud From The Beginning
People will tell you that it often takes a few years to get a true grasp of whether an executive is good at his job or not. They are lying to you. The truth is, the good ones make it known pretty much immediately. Legendary Chicago Bears general manager Jim Finks made Walter Payton his first-ever pick. Chicago Cubs general manager Dallas Green took Joe Carter with his first pick. The divisive but undeniably great Jerry Krause landed Scottie Pippen in his first Chicago Bulls draft. There is no doubt they knew their stuff. The same couldn’t be said for Arturas Karnisovas.
He was hailed as a savior after helping build the Denver Nuggets into an eventual NBA champion. He’d played the game for a long time and had worked his way up the ladder. It felt like a sensible choice. However, it didn’t take people inside the building to recognize that the man didn’t have the chops for the job. According to Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times, team scouts and personnel were floored when Karnisovas bulldozed his way to drafting Patrick Williams 4th overall in 2020, against their protests.
According to a source, Karnisovas and Eversley’s talent evaluation was questionable right away, going back to the 2020 draft — the duo’s first bite at the apple.
Holding No. 4, Karnisovas settled on Patrick Williams. There were multiple scouts and other personnel in the draft room, however, that wanted Tyrese Haliburton. Now, the entire draft process was messed up because of Covid, but Karnisovas specifically was not only fixated on Williams, but didn’t even consider Haliburton a serious prospect.
The source indicated that Karnisovas didn’t even feel like Haliburton would be a top four talent on the Bulls roster at the time.
Arturas Karnisovas swung big when he had no right to.
Here he is, a rookie VP of Basketball Operations in his first draft. His franchise badly needs a foundational player. There were plenty of notable options with loads of starting time and proven production on the board, including Deni Avdija, Tyrese Haliburton, and Tyrese Maxey. Instead, he went with a player who never started on his own team. It was a mind-boggling decision. Karnisovas had bet entirely on upside over proven production with the highest pick the Bulls had held in years.
If that weren’t bad enough, he then doubled down on that decision by giving Williams a $90 million contract extension. Despite such an obvious misfire, the Reinsdorfs kept him in charge for six seasons. As always, they cling to a bad product, praying it might somehow turn good and get rid of good products long before they should. That is a trademark of bad ownership. Now here the Bulls are again. They have two 1st round picks and the most cap space in the NBA. A good VP could use that to enact a rapid organizational turnaround.
The problem is that this ownership hired the last guy.
Smart owners should have honest internal scouting.
That isn’t something found much in organizations. Owners aren’t willing to admit they made a mistake, or they simply aren’t on top of their team’s day-to-day operations. That is why it often takes them so long to realize that the guy they hired isn’t good. Smart people would have a cluster of names within the organization, deemed trustworthy, who conduct an internal review. Not accountants or bureaucrats. Basketball people. If it becomes clear that there are legitimate concerns about an executive or coach, pull the plug and try again.
Alas, there is too much money and pride involved for that to happen. Still, to hear this story isn’t overly shocking. If fans recognized how misguided the pick was at the time, it was obvious the highly knowledgeable scouts and personnel directors knew it too. Sadly, it isn’t something exclusive to the Bulls. There has been an Arturas Karnisovas for most basketball organizations over the years. They just come with different names and faces. Yet the result is always the same. They say a lot of things that their ability can’t cash.