Jim Boylen Actually Felt New Bulls Brass Didn’t Have The Guts To Fire Him

The Jim Boylen era had one good thing going for it. Being short. After a miserable experience spanning almost two seasons, the Chicago Bulls pulled the plug on that experiment. All they needed was a near-mutiny by their players and the overwhelming hatred of the entire fanbase to reach that decision.

Arturas Karnisovas didn’t kick the man while he was down. He simply called the choice to part ways a “basketball decision.” This despite reports that Boylen had a dubious reputation behind the scenes. One that included abuse of power and a temper that saw him get into confrontations including one with a team chef that got lawyers involved.

Yet through all that, it seems the head coach was the perfect analogy of an ostrich. He buried his head in the sand and genuinely thought he was bulletproof. There was no way Karnisovas and the new Bulls regime had the guts to remove him so soon as Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times revealed.

“Because while everything around him screamed that he would in no way see the final two years of the three-year contract extension he was given in the 2019 offseason, a source told the Sun-Times that even as late as this week, Boylen remained confident that he would have whistle in mouth at the Advocate Center when the 2020-21 season began.

The reasoning? Boylen was under the belief that in no way did the new regime of executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas and general manager Marc Eversley want to remove him as the target, starting the clock on their own job security.”

Jim Boylen was always a step too slow for his position

The reality is everybody knows what Boylen was. He was the last hope of a Bulls regime that could no longer hope to lure in actual good coaches. John Paxson and Gar Forman wanted somebody they could control. Boylen was willing to do everything they wanted in exchange for the lucrative position he was handed and all the power that came with it.

The moment those two were removed from the equation, Boylen should’ve felt threatened. Instead, he believed the rumors that ownership really liked him. No doubt he assumed that would be enough to dissuade Karnisovas from firing him. The new Bulls VP of Basketball Operations is clearly made of sterner stuff than that.