DALLAS — The Chicago Bulls ended the season Sunday with one final collapse.
Chicago ended its 2025-26 season with a brutal 149-128 loss to the Dallas Mavericks. The Bulls gave up 80 points by the end of the first half in a game that featured only 10 minutes of playing time from Rookie of the Year frontrunner Cooper Flagg. In the process, they allowed the Mavericks to tally only their 26th win of the season.
Most of the remaining starters on the team — Josh Giddey, Matas Buzelis, Isaac Okoro, Jalen Smith — missed the game with season-ending injuries of varying severity. The Bulls had already been eliminated from playoff contention for more than two weeks. Sunday’s loss simply hammered a final nail into a season of upheaval.
With Sunday’s loss, this group accomplished one goal for the Bulls: 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 on the season. This means the Bulls will have the ninth-highest odds in the NBA draft lottery, with a 20.3% chance of landing in the top four and a 4.5% chance of snagging the first overall pick. In a stacked draft led by AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson and Cameron Boozer, every percentage point matters for the Bulls to improve their odds of moving upward from ninth overall.
Chicago will also anxiously await the results of the Western Conference play-in tournament, where the Portland Trail Blazers will contend for the seventh seed when they face the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday. If the Trail Blazers advance out of the tournament, they will convey an additional first-round draft pick to the Bulls.
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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 this team was fun. They 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 racked up the third-longest losing streak (11 consecutive games) when they lost every single game they played in the month of February. Injuries earned a small sliver of blame, but the Bulls were forced to face the bleak reality that the roster simply did not function as constructed.
Executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas finally acknowledged this truth at the deadline, parting ways 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 Marc Eversley, who were fired Monday as ownership reclaimed the reins of the team after four consecutive seasons without a playoff berth.
Buzelis and Giddey are the only meaningful centerpiece players remaining after a trade deadline clearout. No Coby White. No Ayo Dosunmu. No Nikola Vučević. Patrick Williams is the longest-tenured player on the team — and the only player to have logged more than two seasons in Chicago. More than half of these players are expected to clear their lockers out Monday and not return.
And the greatest problem is that the Bulls don’t know what comes next.
The Bulls 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 2026 NBA draft or how they will approach free agency. And amidst 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 a precipice of change.