The Bulls can hire anyone they want. The real question is whether Michael Reinsdorf will spend – The Athletic

Charles Barkley, as he so often has through the years, said the quiet part out loud while answering a question about the Chicago Bulls.

“They’re irrelevant, and it’s sad,” Barkley said last week during an interview on ESPN’s “Waddle and Silvy” radio show, “because Chicago’s my second-favorite city in the world. … They’re irrelevant. They’re not even in the Play-In. … If you’re not even in the playoff conversation, you’re not good as a team.

“You’re not even close.”

The truth is the Bulls haven’t been close to relevance in more than a decade. There are several reasons for that malaise, but the largest share of blame belongs to team president and CEO Michael Reinsdorf.

Since taking over the day-to-day reins from his father, Jerry, Reinsdorf has developed a reputation around the league for not only hiring the wrong people but also sticking with those hires far longer than he should. He has done little to change a perception that has followed the franchise for decades: that the Bulls will not spend consistently like their peers, either on the roster or throughout the organization.

With that as the context, the Bulls are conducting interviews for their open executive vice president job, after Reinsdorf fired president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas and general manager Marc Eversley earlier this month.

The Athletic confirmed earlier this week that the Bulls have narrowed their list to Detroit Pistons senior vice president Dennis Lindsey, Minnesota Timberwolves general manager Matt Lloyd (a former Bulls front-office executive), Cleveland Cavaliers general manager Mike Gansey, Atlanta Hawks senior vice president Bryson Graham and San Antonio Spurs assistant general manager Dave Telep.

Billy Donovan, whom Reinsdorf seemed intent on keeping even after firing the two highest-ranking members of his front office, resigned last week. Now the new hire will pick his own coach.

But as the Bulls move forward, the same major question hovers over them: Will they spend?

The Bulls have gone into the luxury tax just twice. They have long been mocked around the league for the lack of funding in different areas of the organization compared to other teams (specifically, in the scouting and analytics department until recently). What many league observers are curious about centers on not just the new hires themselves, but whether ownership will spend on the surrounding infrastructure to allow them to be successful.

The Bulls not only haven’t hired the best people available for various roles throughout the years, but they also haven’t given those hires the extra budget needed to go out and fill the rest of the staff with elite-level people. It’s been a source of frustration for many of the rank-and-file employees through the years, according to team and league sources. The Bulls have long had one of the smallest front offices in the league, and even Reinsdorf seems to finally acknowledge how far behind they are compared to their peers.

“We haven’t always recognized the trends of where things are going,” he told reporters earlier this month. “Back in 2012 or ’13, whenever the 3-point shooting started to increase, I bet you had we anticipated that more and how much that was going to change, we probably would have had a different decision-making on some of the players that we drafted. So, you’ve got to stay ahead of this. We’ve got to anticipate.”

As their 31-51 record attests this season, the Bulls simply don’t have enough good players to play winning basketball — a fact that has repeated itself over and over again since the organization fired former coach Tom Thibodeau after the 2014-15 season. Though Karnišovas held a necessary fire sale at the February trade deadline to put the team in a better position for the draft lottery, he didn’t get much in return. Now, the team has a major talent deficit that is going to make winning a challenge over the next few seasons.

Barkley, like so many others across the league, believes it will take years for a new front office to climb out of the mistakes made by the old one.

“You can’t rebuild that thing,” Barkley said. “You got to start over. … We’re talking probably two-, three-year rebuilds, and that’s if you get every trade and every draft pick right.”

The Bulls have optimism in the form of their own lottery pick and another first-round pick from the Portland Trail Blazers in June’s draft. But Reinsdorf has given long-suffering Bulls fans no reason to believe he’ll pick the right people to make the right decisions in the first place.

As bad as the Bulls have been for most of the last decade, Barkley still believes hope can be on the horizon in Chicago. That hope would require Reinsdorf — and his family’s longtime consigliere, John Paxson — to get this hire right this time, something the organization has struggled to do in recent years as Reinsdorf allowed Karnišovas to run out trusted members of the organization.

“I think sports are easy to fix if you know what you’re doing,” Barkley said. “I’ve said this before: If your team sucks for a long period of time, you don’t have people in there who know what they’re doing. I mean that in every sport. … If you get somebody in there and they pick the right players, this thing can turn around quickly.”

Any hire for the Bulls is a critical one, given just how far they’ve fallen over the last decade, but this one is particularly important for Reinsdorf, who failed spectacularly in his first major personnel choices outside of his father’s shadow: picking Karnišovas and Eversley.

The Bulls still have a long way to go to regain respectability, but people around the league are watching closely, waiting to see what Reinsdorf decides. Barkley mentioned Toronto Raptors executive Masai Ujiri as a potential candidate, though it doesn’t appear as if he is in the running as of now. What’s clear is that the Bulls, for all their flaws, are still viewed as one of the premier franchises in the league — thanks in the largest of ways to their past, not their present or future.

“The Bulls are one of the most important franchises in NBA history,” Barkley said. “We need the Chicago Bulls to be good. … The NBA is better when the Celtics are good, the Knicks are good, the Bulls are good, the Lakers are good. Because, in my opinion, those are the most important franchises. We need those teams to be good — plain and simple.”