By Cody Westerlund–

(CBS) As the Bulls attempt a roster overhaul on the fly, much has been made of star Jimmy Butler’s future, their player development and where they’ll land in this June’s draft.

All of that plays a crucial role moving forward in a Bulls’ plan that currently remains staying competitive while developing youngsters around a few veterans providing quality leadership. Amid this partly cloudy vision, there’s also another key element that general manager Gar Forman has been harping on lately: the ability to have salary cap space — and thus flexibility — in the coming summers.

He believes that’s of “extreme importance” and pointed to that as a primary reason for not handing out a contract longer than two years in 2016 free agency.

“We also knew as part of that plan that we’d have to be very disciplined in what we’re doing,” Forman told Matt Spiegel and Barry Rozner on 670 The Score on Friday. “There’s a new CBA in place, and there was a huge cap spike a year ago where you saw a large number of long-term contracts given out to veteran players. And we’re going to look at another cap spike this summer because of the TV revenue, and as we began to add youth, we didn’t want to lock ourselves in to some of those deals at that time because we feel that there’s going to be a flattening of the cap after this summer, and we want to set ourselves up for opportunities that are going to present themselves with having flexibility within our budget. And a big part of our job is managing our cap, especially as we redo this roster.”