Are the Bulls happy with themselves?

Good morning. Billy Donovan lands a long-rumored extension and the front office appears to be around for the long haul. Why? Let's basketball.

Stability is laudable and rare in the NBA. While general managers tend to stick around for a good while in the league, head coaches have shockingly short tenures on average. Sixteen of the the 30 NBA teams have replaced their coach since the end of the 2022-23 season, which was a bit over two years ago. It represents 18 coaches get fired and one retiring. (The Suns are responsible for three of those firings. Incredible.)

There is a team that has long bucked the trend against leadership instability, though: the Chicago Bulls. Their front office personnel tends to have a very, very long leash and their coaches, with a few notable exceptions, tend to stick around beyond what you'd expect based on norms and the Bulls' on-court performance. And that trend appears to be continuing: Chicago signed head coach Billy Donovan to another contract extension and has reportedly also extended the contracts of front office leaders Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley.

Stability is laudable and rare in the NBA. But also ... uhh, are the Bulls happy with themselves? This is not exactly the type of stability most NBA franchises are after. Donovan, Karnisovas and Eversley arrived together in 2020, after the bubble season. (The Bulls did not make the bubble.) Chicago was at its lowest point since the post-Jordan swoon, having moved on from Jimmy Butler to avoid a major financial commitment. (Butler made four All-NBA teams within the next eight years.) A reboot was definitely needed, and Donovan had a moderately successful run in Oklahoma City while Karnisovas had worked in the then-vaunted Denver front office under Tim Connelly. The new front office went to work trying to improve the team by bringing in Nikola Vucevic and DeMar DeRozan to mix with Zach LaVine (the return for Butler under the old regime).

And the team did get better: the Bulls averaged the equivalent of 26 wins in the three seasons after the Butler deal under the old regime (under John Paxson and Gar Forman in the front office and Fred Hoiberg and Jim Boylen in the coaching spot) and averaged the equivalent of 40 wins in the first three seasons of the new regime. That's a big step up.

There have been two more seasons since then. The Bulls have gone 39-43 in each of them and missed the playoffs.