For the first time in five years, the Chicago Bulls will compete in the NBA playoffs. But the mood is far from celebratory in the locker room.
With two games left in the regular season — the home finale Friday against the Charlotte Hornets and Sunday at the Minnesota Timberwolves — the Bulls are floundering after being blown out in three consecutive games. Even with a postseason berth clinched, the team’s confidence has been plummeting as injuries, poor shooting and lax defense dim hopes for a long playoff run.
“We look like a totally different team right now. And it’s upsetting,” guard Zach LaVine said. “We’ve got to get back to what we were doing.”
Three months ago, the Bulls felt like they had arrived, snatching the top spot in the Eastern Conference on the heels of several highlight-stuffed winning streaks. But coach Billy Donovan wasn’t joining in the celebration.
Even when the Bulls were winning consistently, Donovan was concerned with weaknesses he saw across the team — slips in the defense, unsustainably high-shooting accuracy from behind the arc, inexperienced players thrust into starting positions. So the sudden slump didn’t necessarily surprise Donovan, but he also believes it doesn’t define the team.
“When you’re winning, you have a false sense of reality of who you are,” Donovan said. “We’re not as bad as we’ve played. We’re not. But you know what? We probably weren’t as good when we went on (that) nine-game win streak. Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
One easy predictor for the Bulls’ downward trajectory was the difficulty of their schedule in the final third of the season. Coming out of the All-Star break, the Bulls faced the second-toughest stretch behind the Milwaukee Bucks.
The Bulls record reflects that challenge — 7-14 since the All-Star break, the sixth-worst in the league in that 21-game span. Donovan said he wouldn’t trade the schedule for an easier one, hoping the losing streak taught his young roster valuable lessons about how to compete.
“As crazy as it sounds, you have to go through significant adversity challenges because you have to be able to dig out deeper inside,” Donovan said. “There’s a determination, a fight, a competitiveness that you have to have this time of year because you are dealing on margins. That’s what you’re fighting for — margins.”
But other teams won those margins. The defending-champion Bucks, for instance, are 13-6 since the All-Star break despite facing the hardest schedule, carving out a spot for themselves as a potential top-three seed in the East.
The test of a team’s mettle isn’t facing tough opponents; it’s beating them. And the most concerning aspect of the recent skid is the fact the Bulls still haven’t identified its root cause.
“If I could put my finger on it, we could be fixing it,” LaVine said. “So hopefully we can find it.”
Donovan believes one main issue is a lack of consistency — especially for young players such as Ayo Dosunmu and Patrick Williams, who are fresh to late-season competitiveness. They might bring intensity on certain plays and drives, but the Bulls aren’t able to apply pressure for long durations of the game, easing up on opponents long enough to allow runs.
After Wednesday’s blowout loss to the Boston Celtics, Williams admitted he “lacked confidence” contesting players such as Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Those lapses resulted in wide-open opportunities for skilled players to wreak havoc on the Bulls.
“It’s like (they think), ‘Wow, I think I’m playing hard,’ but it’s not good enough,” Donovan said. “These moments where you’re playing against really good, quality teams, you just get to a point where it’s like — what are you competing for?”
“You’re competing for everything on every single possession. You’re competing on the screen. You’re competing to get out there and contest. You’re competing on the glass. There has to be precision and concentration and this intense focus. We’ve got to get that, and I don’t feel like we have that.”
This Bulls season was never meant to be a one-off push to the playoffs. The franchise has been building toward the long term for years around young players such as LaVine and Williams, and the Bulls’ 45-35 record is a massive improvement from four consecutive losing seasons.
But the Bulls are here now — in the playoffs, the exact position the franchise has been seeking for so long — and building for the future will satisfy only so many fans. In the final weekend of the regular season, Donovan believes the gauntlet has been thrown for the Bulls to compete at a higher intensity.
“I’ve loved these guys,” he said. “They’ve been great, and what they’re going through is going to be very valuable in terms of helping them grow. But there’s a lot that goes into this, and it can’t be, ‘Sorry, it’s my fault.’ Those things add up over a period of time.”
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