DALLAS — The Chicago Bulls ended the season Sunday with one final collapse.
The Bulls finished with a 31-51 record after a brutal 149-128 loss to the Dallas Mavericks in which they allowed 80 first-half points. Despite Rookie of the Year front-runner Cooper Flagg playing only 10 minutes, the Mavericks tallied just their 26th win of the season.
Most of the remaining Bulls starters — Josh Giddey, Matas Buzelis, Isaac Okoro, Jalen Smith — missed the game with season-ending injuries of varying severity. The Bulls already had been eliminated from playoff contention for more than two weeks. Sunday’s loss simply hammered a final nail into a season of upheaval.
With the loss, the Bulls accomplished one goal: protecting their best possible draft lottery odds by staying a game behind the Milwaukee Bucks in the overall standings.
The Bulls eked out a slightly worse record than the Bucks, who finished 32-50. That means the Bulls will have the ninth-highest lottery odds, with a 20.3% chance of landing in the top four and a 4.5% chance of snagging the No. 1 pick. In a stacked draft led by AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson and Cameron Boozer, every percentage point matters for the Bulls to potentially move up from ninth.
The Bulls will also anxiously await the results of the Western Conference play-in tournament, in which the Portland Trail Blazers face the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday with the No. 7 playoff seed at stake. If the Blazers advance to the playoffs — and out of the lottery — they would convey an additional first-round pick to the Bulls.
If the Blazers lose to the Suns, they would have another chance to make the playoffs as the No. 8 seed via a Friday play-in game against the winner of Wednesday’s game between the Los Angeles Clippers and Golden State Warriors.
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It’s hard to align this strip-mined husk of the 2025-26 Bulls roster with the hopeful young team that surged to a 6-1 start back in November. That version of the team was fun. It seemed tough, bringing enough of an edge to square up to better opponents.
It didn’t take long for that sheen to wear off, revealing the truth of what lay under the surface. But for a couple of weeks, it wasn’t too hard to be convinced that Bulls basketball might be something to be proud of this season.
That belief quickly evaporated. The Bulls lost seven straight games in November in a rapid regression to the mean. They later went on an 11-game losing streak — the third-longest in franchise history — losing every game in February. Injuries accounted for a sliver of blame, but the Bulls were forced to face the bleak reality that the roster simply didn’t function as constructed.
Executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas finally acknowledged this truth at the trade deadline, parting with eight players in a sharp pivot toward a rebuild. That last-ditch effort, however, wasn’t enough to save the jobs of Karnišovas and general manager Marc Eversley, who were fired April 6 after four consecutive seasons without a playoff berth.
Buzelis and Giddey are the only meaningful centerpiece players remaining after the trade-deadline clear-out. No Coby White. No Ayo Dosunmu. No Nikola Vučević. Patrick Williams is the longest-tenured player — the only one with more than two seasons in Chicago. More than half of the players on the final roster aren’t expected to return.
And the greatest problem is the Bulls don’t know what comes next.
They don’t know who will be their next top executive. They also don’t know if coach Billy Donovan will return. They don’t know where they will pick in a deep NBA draft or how they will approach free agency. And amid all this unknown, it’s hard to chart a trajectory for how long this team will need to suffer before prosperity can begin to blossom again.
The season is over. But the important work starts now for a Bulls team teetering on the precipice of change.