Chicago Bulls: John Paxson will significantly limit GM search

The Chicago Bulls search for a new general manager will not go as well as fans will hope.

For a brief moment, Chicago Bulls fans rejoiced over the weekend. Over the weekend, news broke that the team was using the All-Start Weekend to kickstart their search for a new general manager. If you were watching the festivities and saw that alert scroll across your phone, you likely gave a pretty strong fist pump, or maybe let out a celebratory “yyyyyyyeeeeesssss!!”

Unfortunately, if you clicked on the article and read it, your exuberance was short-lived. That’s because the piece made clear that John Paxson, president of basketball operations, would remain in his role and will not have his role diminished in any way. In other words, absolutely nothing will change and that will have significant ramifications on the team’s ability to find a new general manager.

Although the Bulls will move to officially replace current general manager Gar Forman, his role has been significantly diminished recently, and his influence extremely limited. Naming a new general manager will memorialize what has already occurred. However, the reality is Paxson has and apparently will continue to exert significant influence over the day-to-day decision-making process. He will have as strong a voice as ever.

And that fact is what will make it almost impossible for the Bulls to attract a quality general manager candidate. Using an analogy from the Chicago Bears, it was no secret that they were going to have a difficult time finding a new offensive coordinator, primarily because the new offensive coordinator would not be calling plays. That responsibility belongs to Matt Nagy.

Similarly, what quality general manager would want to walk into a situation where they will not have the autonomy to make decisions about the team. No one is going to want to be evaluated and held accountable as a general manager when someone else is really in control.

Think about this for a moment — Paxson has managed to completely destroy this franchise over the past five years and is mired in an indefinite rebuild, which has included hiring perhaps the most incompetent coach in all of professional sports. Despite all of this, not only is he not fired, but he seems to still have the full faith and confidence of his owner, Jerry Reinsdorf.

If you’re a general manager looking at that situation from the outside, why in the world would you want to subject yourself to that kind of toxic environment? The answer, obviously is, you wouldn’t — and that’s why the Bulls will likely have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for their next puppet — I mean general manager.