The Chicago Bulls waived Jaden Ivey on Monday after a series of anti-LGBTQ+ social media posts, but the story of how this all went sideways started well before the Instagram livestreams.
Before Ivey ever arrived in Chicago, the word out of Detroit was that the shooting guard was something of a preacher. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, his media sessions bore that out, with Ivey turning postgame availability into something closer to a revival meeting, asking reporters whether they had been “saved” and whether they had “fornicated before marriage.”
I’m sorry but what https://t.co/XjmwQCZylS pic.twitter.com/8MUxb9AV90
— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) March 31, 2026
The Bulls acquired him at the trade deadline in February anyway, apparently without doing enough homework on what they were getting.
I was told he did similar things in Detroit. He confronted reporters on the job about whether they were saved, and some Piston staff. Can’t speak to what he did or didn’t do in Chicago. https://t.co/cu7y5e69X9
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) March 31, 2026
Ivey, the No. 5 overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft out of Purdue, was acquired from Detroit at the trade deadline in February and played four games for Chicago before a left knee injury shut him down for the season. During that time, he posted a series of lengthy Instagram videos connecting his injury to his faith and questioning his former team’s standing in the afterlife. The videos might have been tolerable in isolation, but the Bulls drew the line when Ivey went live on Instagram and called the NBA’s celebration of Pride Month an endorsement of “unrighteousness.”
“The world can proclaim LGBTQ, right?” Ivey said in the video. “They proclaim Pride Month. And the NBA, they proclaim it. They show it to the world. They say, ‘Come join us for Pride Month, to celebrate unrighteousness.’ They proclaim it. They proclaim it on the billboards. They proclaim it in the streets. Unrighteousness.”
The Bulls announced the waiving, citing “conduct detrimental to the team.” ESPN’s Shams Charania reported the move before the official announcement, noting the anti-LGBTQ+ comments specifically.
The decision to cut Ivey was the easy part. The Sun-Times’ Joe Cowley argued that the fiasco is ultimately an indictment of the Bulls front office under executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas, that the acquisition itself reflected a broader pattern of due diligence failures, and that the Reinsdorf family missed an opportunity to clean house entirely when they waived Ivey rather than pairing the move with front office changes.
The red flags, Cowley wrote, were there before Ivey ever set foot in Chicago.