The 2024-25 NBA season is winding to a close, and with March Madness officially underway, it’s about the time in the calendar where we begin looking at the teams outside of the NBA title picture and start to wonder, what the hell do they have going on? It’s not uncommon that what most of these teams have going on won’t come to fruition until the upcoming summer. But in some cases, even the most plugged in writers and analysts are unsure what the plan of attack is. There is no team that epitomizes this more than the Chicago Bulls.

In a recent rundown of all 11 teams who are clearly in a position where a rebuild is necessary, ESPN’s Tim Bontemps not only placed Chicago dead last in those rankings, but struggled to find both rationale for what Bulls general manager Arturas Karnisovas and owner Jerry Reinsdorf have been doing, or what their path forward out of irrelevancy is.

“For the Bulls, there is salary cap flexibility coming in 2026, but none this summer,” Bontemps notes. “Alex Caruso, DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine were traded away in the past several months, and the only first-round pick that came back between all of those deals was Chicago’s previously dealt top-10-protected pick in June — one the Bulls were never in serious danger of losing.”

The Bulls are stuck in NBA purgatory, having finished with somewhere between 22 and 46 wins in each of the last 10 seasons. In fairness, this is a place that this franchise has spent a great deal of time in since Michael Jordan’s second retirement in 1998. By now, being middle of the pack could be considered the status quo in Chicago, with the exception of a handful of seasons during Derrick Rose’s peak, and of course, the Bulls were only able to enjoy Rose’s peak because they won the 2008 draft lottery despite just a 1.7 percent chance of doing so.

The Bulls now will find themselves in a similar position as they were in back in 2008, hoping that the lottery balls bounce the right way and land them Cooper Flagg, or maybe even Dylan Harper or Ace Bailey. But if they don’t get lucky once again, this miserable run could easily continue for another few years.

“It has been 10 years since the Bulls won a playoff series,” Bontemps says. “It’s hard to see that streak ending before the end of the decade. Stroke of luck in May would obviously be a big boost to that timeline.”