Jake Fischer Latest: All eyes on the Windy City this (NBA) shopping season

No team, as Fischer explains in his latest dispatch, is being monitored by rivals for potential trade activity more than the formerly trade-shy Bulls

We walked to lunch, Artūras Karnišovas and I. Back in November 2019, when the Chicago Bulls' executive vice president ranked second in command in Nuggets basketball operations, this reporter shuttled west to Denver to learn more about the blossoming contender being built around Nikola Jokić.

Karnišovas was charismatic, funny, telling tales of nearby hikes, followed by stories from a staff-wide preseason whitewater rafting trip. There was something in that thin Colorado air. Something palpable.

"I think the success is gonna get attention for everybody," Karnišovas told me that afternoon. "Players get new contracts, coaches stay in the same place, [the] front office gets rewarded."

Within six months, Karnišovas had been hired to run the Bulls. Sweeping moves over the ensuing year-plus surrounded All-Star guard Zach LaVine with Nikola Vučević, DeMar DeRozan and Lonzo Ball. You know by now that Ball's knee injuries derailed a team that briefly held the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference — for two years and counting. I've often thought about how difficult that outcome must be to digest for Karnišovas after finally being afforded the chance to run his own front office. Ditto for Ball after he started so splashily as a Bull. Isn't that what we all want?

Now success for that quartet of players will likely be judged on what Karnišovas — after signing-and-trading DeRozan to Sacramento in the summer — can generate on the trade market for the veterans who remain in Chicago. Such is the vicious life cycle of NBA team-building.

If you want trades this holiday season, you and general managers alike need the emergence of true sellers in the NBA's marketplace. It's no secret that the Washington Wizards have veterans to move. Utah, Portland and Toronto likewise belong on that list.

Yet no discussion of likely sellers, in today's NBA, starts without Karnisovas' Bulls.