In the fifth game of the Chicago Bulls season, they ran into a problem that has yet to be resolved. They narrowly lost the game – 104-103, to the New York Knicks – and were still 4-1 the following season. As they then went on to a tear that lasted for months, people simply forgot the subject, but those prone to worry remembered what it looked like when Patrick Williams left the game with an injury, which he kept so far from the ground, and the Lonzo Ball guarded Julius Randle.
Ball was at a disadvantage of a few inches, but dozens of pounds. The Bulls were out 49-37 in the contest, and are the second worst team in rebounds per game over the course of the season. Without Williams, the Bulls lineups are mostly from a center (Nikola Vucevic), and four players who have spent most of their careers as guards. Not so surprisingly, they were also one of the most injured teams of the year; Williams was just starting out, with Ball, Alex Caruso, Derrick Jones Jr., and Javonte Green also missing significant time. Zach LaVine also missed a few, but more importantly, he has a compromised knee and does not look like his typical explosive self on the floor.
Underdimensional, battered, and visibly very tired, the team has now hit a wall of elite teams and lost eight of their last 10 games, with just three wins to their name since the All-Star break. It’s a hard time being a Bulls fan, especially because of the big ecstasies of December and February. March is, of course, a dubious dog day part of the NBA calendar, from a weird mix of tune-ups, cargo management, tanking and malaise; except for a few groundbreaking, definitive MVP course performances, which usually happen during this month stays here, with the real memories in April and May.
This is where the more optimistic thinking about the state of the Bulls begins. It’s, technically speaking, possible for them to get healthy and fit in the coming weeks, back to their beautiful uptempo ensemble ways of earlier in the season, and master the only occasional witness perfect balance between LaVine, Vucevic, and DeMar DeRozan. It is DeRozan, in particular, who has tackled the Bulls’ otherwise thorough roster deficiencies for much of the year, the best stretch of his career ahead of the All-Star break with 34.2 points per game in February, at 55.3 percent shooting . These numbers may seem absurd, but they are even more so when you observe how they were collected; over and over, DeRozan ratcheted up his opponents and as the game went on, knocked out opponents with unguardable mid-range touch in the clutch.
We saw something similar from Damian Lillard last year: his Portland Trail Blazers, like DeRozan’s Bulls for much of this year, exceeded their average offensive and defensive performance in the standings due to how often his warm hand and the weak moments of the game gave them got slim. Victory. Like last year’s Blazers, the Bulls are now discovering how unsustainable a winning strategy this is – rarely has their diet included the meat-and-potatoes of any elite team, which is blowout victories. As teams aggressively drop the silver bullet that DeRozan is getting, they don’t even eat profit.
And because the bulls are so small, they inevitably lose almost every micro-battle in the post and on the wing, and bloom simply by exclusion. It might have been better with a healthy Williams, who has seductive potential as a great wing forward, but a rugged 82-game roster design does not depend so much on a single 20-year-old. That Chicago recently signed and immediately integrated the clearly rejected Tristan Thompson into their rotation so prominently is a testament to how poorly prepared the team was for the big boy beef war that is getting more and more intense each season. After spending most of the season at the helm of the Eastern Conference, the bulls are now boxed out of a higher seed.
Of course, it is not all doom and gloom. Last season’s team improvement was huge, and apart from Vucevic and DeRozan they remain a young core with massive improvement potential. This is true for the next few weeks, but even more so for the coming years. Pessimists can claim that there will be no replacement for Vucevic and DeRozan as they age, and that the Bulls have barely opened windows for a deep playoff run already with their missed chance to work everything out this season. But Chicago’s new front office regime has already surprised its fan base a lot with its resource, and now they have more of a base to cook than they did before.
How much longer this year’s course will take, it is clear that the organization is capable of building another, probably better, one in the near future. The Bulls season was a success because it proved it, and the city revitalized its connection to its team. There is little doubt that they are looking for the bigger bodies that can keep the team vital in the spring of the upcoming offseason, and if they can balance that pursuit with the dynamic guard-driven frenzy that will drive the franchise back into the Relevance, then, will have a more playoff-ready stew on their hands. And perhaps this charged version of the team is a mirage, soon corrected by what happens next. But for the moment, it seems that while the bulls are still back, it is somewhere remarkably short of the glory that their logo presents.
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