Rahimi, Harris & Grote Show - Joel Lorenzi shares background on Jaden Ivey's turbulent exit from Bulls

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Leila Rahimi and Marshall Harris were joined by Joel Lorenzi of The Athletic to discuss the Bulls waiving guard Jaden Ivey after he made anti-LGBTQ comments.

We go to our hotline and also to Twitch, twitch.tv. TV slash the score Chicago. We bring in the athletic NBA writer, Joelle Lorenzi. He's at Joel X Lorenzi on X. He covers the NBA via Chicago. He has been a very big part of covering the Bulls most recently. And he's a part of a story that is right now out on the athletic. The headline is Jaden Ivy's turbulent NBA career from top five pick to waived by the Bulls.

Joelle, thanks for joining us. Always. How are you guys doing? Good. I hadn't been able to talk about this story until today. And it's just, it's upsetting from a personal standpoint of just hoping he's okay. How has this unfolded for you when it's come to being a part of the beat that covered him and then also the events that have all taken place and seeing the videos that continue to come out on social media? Yeah, it's a bit difficult to cover because I am by no means an expert in psychology, religion, pretty much most of the things that this situation covers. I am a basketball guy and a writer.

So you want to treat this delicately, right? Because it is a delicate situation. You don't want to make assumptions. You want to just kind of relay what he's putting out there. He's talked what feels like almost every day. Yesterday was like our first break from him going live almost since he got, since the bull shut his season down. And so it's been a lot. A lot's been said.

There's been a lot of words, a lot of controversial words at that. And it's unlike anything I've ever covered. I mean, my first month on the job was my first month. on the job of okay she i should say was when the giddy stuff happened and to me that was pretty unprecedented and now i mean this is this is easily the most bizarre thing i could cover for for for for lack of a better word it's it's it's unlike anything i've ever covered i'm curious joel as far as talking to jane ivy himself before all of this took place because there's reports of him you know trying to push his religious beliefs on others and that

extends beyond the team to even beat reporters. Has he ever had these types of conversations that have been described with you? Not me personally, no, but I can't confirm that he's used language like fornicate and things about premarital sex with other reporters. Like, I know that. I had no firsthand accounts for sure, dating back to when he was in Detroit. And so, like, we can talk about a timeline. I don't know, like, I imagine we're going to get into, like, due diligence on the Bulls end.

I don't want to, like, accuse them of, like, being completely oblivious, but, like, some of the writing was on the wall. Like, I just think of, like, obviously, the two teams I spent the most time around are the Thunder and the Bulls. And we know basketball-wise, they operate in completely different spaces. But I know that something I've been thinking about is, you know, if San Presti got wind of, I mean, I'm sure you guys have seen this. Maybe not. But we documented it in the story you referenced. Ten days after he broke his leg in Detroit in January of 2025, he goes on a podcast.

And his testimony includes talking about, in his words, being abusive, which I don't think he details physical abuse, but he calls himself an abuser. He mentions a pornography addiction. He goes down this sort of road where. if you are like I am I don't want to speak like I'm a judge of character but if you're a team and you're filtering what kind of guys you want to bring in a building and what you want to be part of I imagine that's like a red flag for you and that stuff was that stuff was public that was out there and I don't know what the Bulls had access to but I can't confirm like Detroit media did happen to deal with talking to him and and the word fornicate being used with them and things of that nature. I mean, it's, it just puts people in a really tough spot. Like, it puts people in an awkward spot.

You want to have a candid relationship that's professional as reporters with somebody you're trying to interview. And as we understand, Joel, some of this is also, he couldn't answer questions about basketball without bringing some of this stuff up first. Yeah. You couldn't get answers about the actual games or about his actual performance. And then we see really disturbing video where he talks about suicide attempts and pills and that type of thing. I mean, it's it's a lot to take in.

And you're right. There's a part where you want to report the story as well as you can. But then people are thrust into being part of the story when this is happening in these ways. Yeah. And I've tried to remove myself as much as possible. For what it's worth, we never really even got to know him, I'd say, as a, the Bulls beat. I mean, because, like, he was available twice while he was a bull. The one time, and I wasn't there the first time, was in Toronto on a day of the deadline when he joined the team.

The second time was the, I guess we can call it infamous now, the 10-minute interview he did after he picked up a DMP on February 9th. I believe. And that was when I think we got as a beat the sense that like, okay, like, this is kind of who he is where you mentioned, like, you know, conversations and interviews are quickly derailing into him sort of like kind of just, I don't know if infringes the word I want to use. I mean, it's a word J. B. Biggerstaff used, maybe not in describing.

I mean, Jayden's action specifically, but he was just, those are his general comments after being asked about Ivy. We got the sense in that interview, like, okay, he's, there's kind of, to this extent, he's almost infringing his beliefs upon us. He's using words like repents and stuff like that and sinner, which we've seen in the past week. And we're just, we're asking about his DMP. I mean, to, like, to use his own words, he thought it was his first DMP of his career. which is probably true. And so like in that night, and we wrote this in the story this week, that night he, he kind of expressed this like distaste in the idea that we were like singling him out.

He felt almost like a, like a victim because we were asking him about the DMP. And we assured him like, no, like, hey, like we're, if this was Rob Dillingham or Aunt Simon's, like we would have been at their locker too because frankly, like the story. was, yo, like, AK went and got six guards or made a sort of the team had six guards at the deadline. Like, there was going to be some fallout from that. And that was the idea of what we were covering. We had no idea that it was going to spiral into Ivy. I mean, 10 of those minutes, six of them, six or seven of them were probably spent. I would I be, you know, professing his love for Jesus? And we're just asking him about, you know, did you practice

with the team this week? why did they give you an idea of why you might not have played tonight? That sort of stuff. So I think that was when we first got an idea of what he was sort of like. And Joel, we're up against it here, but I really am curious. How much blowback do you think, if any, Archer's Carner Chavez, in the front office are going to get? You pair this and what happened. You talk about due diligence with information that was out there before they made the trade about what this man was talking about, J.Nivey.

and then you look at a performance like the one Usman Jing puts together last night. I feel like you can look at the trade deadline and say it has been highly unsuccessful in terms of taking flyers on guys and trying to find guys who pair up with this quote-unquote timeline of Modis Buzellis and Josh Giddy going forward.

Yeah, I will say on an Usman-Jang front because that's obviously a guy I watched an OKC2. The jury's still out on him, right? but I think generally it does speak to like bad process. I know people will say, well, hey, it shows that they don't have a plan. I think the plan's been pretty clear. The plan has been one of Discord. You know, obviously, Billy, if you are trying to reset, Billy makes that harder because he is so wired to win.

But that move specifically in a vacuum. It's like, hey, you got off U.S., a guy who, like you said, fits the timeline, maybe has some untimely. that potential as a guy who was buried on the Thunder's bench in favor of Nick Richards, who I don't know what the future holds for Nick Richards, but they clearly get it to, like, fill the front court because the front court, the cupboard is bare in the front court, which is like bad process in general to me. Agreed. On the Ivy front, though, I don't want to, I don't want to defend the move here.

The sense I get is like that he, coincidentally, kind of like radicalized. I mean, he's gone through this insane, devastating injury history in the last two years. It does seem like he's radicalized over the past few months. I don't know that that started the day he got to Chicago. Maybe Detroit hid some of this well. Maybe the move and the trade sort of amplified what was inside of him. But going back to what I said earlier, like some of this was available.

I don't know what due diligence the Bulls did, to what extent, what was accessible. I imagine, I mean, in talking to some teams, I mean, obviously teams are going to defend their information gathering, but like it seems like a mistake that not many teams would have made. Again, I think it is possible to he radicalized around the time of the trade and that some of the nature of some of the things we're talking about. became more conspicuous. But like him on that podcast, that happened in January 2025. And that's like publicly accessible. So I think on that part, it's probably bad process. But again, this is a guy that I think they genuinely thought had starter upside

that they could sort of revive some of that once tantalized in athleticism and have be a guy for this build. So, you know, I do think in a lot of ways it was bad process. Maybe, maybe not as much. I'd argue Usman Jang is more a bad process. Just because on his face, you knew at the time what it was. This thing obviously has become something that they probably couldn't have predicted, even though the writing was somewhat on the wall. Joelle, thank you for your work. Thanks for the perspective today. Thanks for your reporting. if you want to check out that story, Jaden Ivy's turbulent NBA career

from top five pick to waived by the Bulls. That is on the athletic right now. I know you will continue to track this story. Thanks for the time. Thanks. Thanks, Joelle. That is Joelle Lorenzi. You can check out more of his work on X at Joel X Lorenzi.