Since then, he still hasn’t stepped foot in the Bulls’ facilities.
Karnisovas and Eversley want the opportunity to sit down and have a face-to-face discussion with each person before deciding if they’ll be retained or dismissed. That could still be awhile, as it's unclear when teams will be allowed to gather in their facilities with many states still under stay-at-home orders.
“We owe it to everybody on staff to get to Chicago and meet them face to face,” Eversley said on a Zoom call Friday. “I think we owe to our players to hopefully get to evaluate them in practice settings, in playing settings. And we owe it to our staff to see them in those types of settings as well. I just think it's far too early to make those types of decisions with respect to anybody on the staff until we get to Chicago.”
Each call will be a “joint decision” between the Bulls’ new top two basketball executives, Eversley said. The most important one will be Boylen’s future, as Karnisovas has already extolled the importance of a head coach setting the daily tone for an organization.
“It is really early,” Eversley said of his evaluation of Boylen, who owns a 39-84 record leading the Bulls across parts of two seasons. “Coach and I did have a conversation earlier in the week where he called to congratulate me on accepting the position. Just like anything else on our staff, we are going to utilize our time to evaluate everybody on staff – not only players, coaches but also people in the front office as well. I’ve spoken to Coach, we had a really great conversation and I’m looking forward to spending time with him in Chicago when we’re afforded that opportunity.”
After being hired, Karnisovas quickly hired assistant general manager J.J. Polk and vice president of player personnel Pat Connelly. He hasn’t revealed the fates of the rest of the front office, which currently include holdovers such as associate general manager Brian Hagen, assistant general manager Steve Weinman, director of international scouting Ivica Dukan and director of pro personnel Jim Paxson. The Bulls also haven’t officially commented on advisor Doug Collins’ future, though his role had already minimized and he was largely a sounding board for former lead executive John Paxson, who has since moved to an advisory role.
Of course, it's Boylen who will continue to garner the most attention.
“My initial impression of Jim is he cares a great deal about this team and he's as anxious as everyone else to get back in the gym,” Karnisovas said. “My first priority was to hire Marc, J.J. Polk and Pat Connelly in order to implement my vision, our vision, to create sustainable program that can be good for a very long time.
“Going back to coaching, we've had a chance to meet a couple times over Zoom, but it's not only been two weeks. Like I said before, I'm going to do my comprehensive evaluation of every department and ensure I give the process the time it deserves. We are limited right now with what we can do. Instead of being in the practice facility and being in Chicago, we're at home doing video and audio calls like this one. It makes it difficult. So until we get to some level of normalcy, and I don't know what that looks like, we will not be able to fully access the current situation.”