Are Chicago Bulls fans really excited for another 39-win, ninth-place season?

Posted October 21, 2025 11:41 am

By Jon Greenberg

You have to respect the consistency, if not the effort.

In the last three seasons, the Bulls finished with 40, 39 and 39 wins, finishing 10th, ninth and ninth in the Eastern Conference. And each of those seasons ended at the hands of the Miami Heat in the Play-In Tournament by lopsided margins.

Despite the obvious malaise, the front office and head coach received contract extensions. The Bulls still lead the NBA in attendance and are estimated to be worth between $5 billion and $6 billion.

While ownership and management are hardly popular right now, at least the Bulls are profitable, if not also completely irrelevant on a national scale.

This year, the NBA has new national TV partners in Amazon and NBC in addition to its ABC/ESPN package. The only Bulls presence on NBC’s broadcasts will be occasional sightings of Michael Jordan for a season-long interview program with Mike Tirico.

The current team is slated to have zero games on ABC or NBC, just one on terrestrial ESPN, and one game each on Peacock and Amazon Prime. For that light work, the Bulls will collect approximately $140 million.

To borrow a popular phrase, they are the kid in the group project who did none of the work but still got the A.

The Bulls are completely absent from the national talk shows or the TNT (now on ESPN) crew. When the NBA podcasts talk about the Bulls, it’s usually to mock them or express confusion about their plan.

If I were Michael or Jerry Reinsdorf, this would all be concerning. But I’d also be very, very rich, so I guess I’d be more concerned about other things like Scottsdale sunsets or the White Sox’s next pitching coach.

As the Bulls prepare to open another season this Wednesday at home against the Detroit Pistons, they aren’t quite an afterthought, but it’s close. The passion they used to incite, for good or bad reasons, is waning. The two sports talk stations in town see little reason in talking Bulls, especially during Bears season. In casual conversation, Chicagoans are more likely to complain about the team’s shortcomings (and the Reinsdorfs) than they are to show fervent interest in the team.

The online diehards will continue to invest time into the minutiae surrounding a Bulls season, if only to have something to complain or dream about. Meanwhile, the Bulls business types can ignore the outside noise, because the team fills the United Center thanks to corporate fans, people who like a night out at the game (which I believe is the biggest slice of the crowd) and the fans who either don’t care about the results or are there to root for the other team. It’s why the Bulls don’t want to tank. The goal from up top is to provide a product that fills dates in a large arena, which was really the origin of the league in the first place.

It’ll be interesting to see the crowds this season. There are, at last glance, plenty of good seats available for the opener.

I like nothing more than turning on the car radio during a game and hearing Chuck Swirsky and Bill Wennington call a game during a winter night, but many fans found themselves without easy TV access to the team last year and let me tell you, there wasn’t exactly a march on Comcast to get a deal done.

Last season, the Bulls’ new RSN wasn’t available on Chicago’s biggest cable provider, and according to the Sports Business Journal, the Bulls had “the sharpest percentage drop in the league, down 58%, and the second-largest impression drop (defined as the number of households tuning in), down 25,894.”

Those numbers will rise because a deal was settled during the baseball season, and the Chicago Sports Network is now on Comcast’s “Ultimate TV” package, which requires an upcharge. The option to watch for free on a digital antenna is now gone, but fans of the Blackhawks, Bulls and White Sox can also get a streaming subscription for $19.99-$29.99 a month.

But how many will switch their cable plan or buy a separate subscription. Bulls buzz is more like static from a TV using rabbit ears.

And yet, I find this team more interesting than they have been in years. It’s a low bar to clear, but still.

For one, there’s the chance to watch the real-time development of homegrown forward Matas Buzelis, who could very well take the “leap” this season. He made the NBA All-Rookie Second Team last season, and he should continue to flourish under newly minted Hall of Fame coach Billy Donovan.

Donovan, of course, was just enshrined in Springfield on the strength of his college coaching career. After a solid run in Oklahoma City, he’s been nothing more than a sub-.500 coach in Chicago. The Bulls haven’t smelled a winning record past the first two weeks of the season in years.

But he’s still better at his job than almost everyone in the Bulls organization, and he’s got an intriguing project on his hands in the Bulls’ latest first-round pick, Noa Essengue, the young French big man. For all my biting cynicism about the front office, I loved this pick because I don’t think they can come up with a plan or a way to attract star players, so why not take a chance on a Euro with upside?

Essengue should bounce between the NBA and the G League and hopefully, for the Bulls’ sake, like Buzelis, he becomes a rotational player by the end of the season. Those two players aren’t exactly the core of a future Eastern Conference contender, but at least they represent hope.

Of the returning players, I really enjoy watching Coby White, who rejuvenated his career in recent years and is wildly underpaid as he plays out the end of a three-year, $36 million deal. He’ll be an unrestricted free agent after the season, and if I were the Bulls, I’d try to sign him. He’s starting the season on the bench, however, with a right calf strain.

Point guard Josh Giddey can be fun, and Chicagoans take a lot of pride in the way local guy Ayo Dosunmu plays. The hope of Patrick Williams developing into a front-line starter is essentially over. Nikola Vučević should’ve been traded by now.

In general, it’s a nice group of guys with no hope of competing for a title — making the actual playoffs and not just the Play-In Tournament would merit a Champagne celebration — so you just have to hope they’re fun to watch most nights.

Last year, the Bulls said they would play with increased pace, and they did that. They averaged 117.8 points and gave up 119.4. The year before, it was 112.3 and 113.7. They were entertaining at the end of the season when other teams had given up, but when it came time to play the Heat in the Play-In, they had no shot.

This will be the 11th season since the Bulls fired Tom Thibodeau, and in the ensuing 10 campaigns, the Bulls have had just two winning seasons and two playoff appearances. I don’t expect either of those things to happen this season either, though they should finish with more wins than the sportsbooks are predicting. (Both DraftKings and BetMGM have them at 33.5.)

But the season must be played, and who knows, maybe Buzelis turns into an All-Star, and with Giddey leading the way, they run teams off the floor, and everyone subscribes to CHSN, and the national TV partners rush to add the Bulls to the schedule.

That’s the dream. The reality is 39-43 and another ninth-place finish in the East.