There was Martin Luther King Jr’s Lincoln Memorial, “I have a dream” speech, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg “Four score and seven years ago,” Ronald Reagan’s Berlin “Tear down this wall,” and Patrick Henry’s Virginia “Give me liberty of give me death.”
And then Wednesday in the wake of the Bulls 110-94 defeat by a compendium of Atlanta Hawks and College Park Skyhawks, there was Vooch’s United Center locker room, “We needed to understand why we lost” address.
So maybe the basketball world will little note nor long remember what the Bulls center had to say after the deflating loss led by Hawks G League players with most of the regular Atlanta roster suggesting they were injured. But Vučević also seemed to understand someone had to consecrate that locker room lest it become a cemetery for this Bulls season.
“It’s right here to define the season,” said Coby White. “It’s going to define the true character of this (locker) room. Are we going to let it spiral and dwindle and keep going downhill? Or take a stand and next game come out ready to compete?
“Vooch said it all postgame,” White complimented. “(He said) stop doing the dumb stuff that we’ve been doing. Stop not boxing out, not rebounding, stop with the switch confusion, stop being back cut. Vooch is 100% correct. He spoke up, and he dug into us. Coach didn’t have to say much; Vooch hit on everything. We’ve got to stay together as a team. That was one of the messages after Vooch spoke. With stuff not going your way, going through adversity…the games are going to keep coming. We’re the only ones who can dig ourselves out of this hole. It’s not the coaches, the fans. It’s on us. Like Vooch said, being in the right spot, boxing out, communicating on defense; that’s the stuff you can control and we haven’t been doing that. We have to figure it out as a team. You’re going to have ups and downs during the season; you have to stay the course. Right now we’re going through a storm. So we have to figure out how to get through it and what is blocking us from being great. We needed him to speak up, we needed him to lead us. It was good for us, for the team, good for Vooch to get it off his chest and hold everyone accountable. And he put himself in there also, holding himself accountable.”
Vučević did have a season most 16 rebounds to go along with his 14 points. White led the Bulls with 16 points and Zach LaVine added 15, Bulls coach Billy Donovan admitting he’s been pushing LaVine’s playing time the most in desperate need of his scoring. But the Bulls again were steps slow, moments late, Atlanta with 27 second chance points and 22 points from 20 Bulls turnovers, the formula that doomed the Bulls Tuesday against the New Orleans Pelicans. The Bulls also were a look-away, nothing-to-see-here six of 27 on threes in a game they never led and trailed by 17 points before halftime.
Though the greatest indignity, and perhaps what inspired Vučević‘s verbal reckoning, was that 80 points and four of the top six Atlanta players sat out with alleged injuries, including Trae Young. They were replaced by two-way G League players, Daeqwon Plowden making his NBA debut and Keaton Wallace, the second best NBA player in his family.
Atlanta’s starting lineup also included Vit Krejčí and David Roddy, and this was one of those games we would have joked years ago about the team selling more scorecards. If such things existed anymore. The Bulls didn’t seem to know who they were, either, as Wallace, whose brother Cason is a vital role player for the Oklahoma City Thunder, doubled his career high with 27 points and added six rebounds, six assists and four steals. Plowden contributed 19 points making his first seven field goal attempts and was five of six on threes, the spare Hawks getting a dozen more shot attempts with all their hustle and loose ball plays.
“Not playing to our identity,” lamented White. “A lot is the pace. We’re not playing with that same thrust, that same pace which created a lot of downhill attacks, open threes, getting out in transition.”
Just a lot of head shaking all around after Ayo Dosunmu in his return after missing 10 games with a calf injury got the Bulls running with a couple of early fast break scores. Julian Phillips put back a pair of dunks and LaVine got a layup and steal and the assist on Dosunmu’s runout, and the teams were tied at 23 in the first quarter and Atlanta was barely ahead 27-25 after one quarter.
But that seemed about all the Bulls had, then giving up the straight line drives, baseline and back cuts, little effort defensively in transition or resistance, fouling three-point shooters, several turnovers just stepping out of bounds, no hoops sonnet this. Let us count the way to this defeat.
The Hawks then hung a 15-0 run on the Bulls for a 61-47 halftime lead. There was a cameo Zach-to-the-rescue to start the third with a few baskets. But there then was no stopping Daeqwon Plowden, the Bulls web site proud to have written that for the first time in pro basketball history. The Bulls hung around some and then didn’t score the last four minutes of the game.
So if this was some sort of watershed, someone throw them some a floaty.
Wednesday’s game was the season’s mid-point, the team’s 41st game as the Bulls in 10th place in the Eastern Conference fell to 18-23. Atlanta is 21-19.
If this is a race to gain a playoff spot as Donovan has suggested all season, then these sands of hope seem to be quickly disappearing. At five games under .500 perhaps it’s no coincidence, though Donovan insists this was an anomaly.
The goal is to win,” Donovan reiterated post game when asked about the Bulls direction. “That’s been our focus. We’ve got to be able to control the things we can control a whole lot better. I know we’ve played a lot better; this has not been a trend the whole year. What’s been a trend is the inconsistency part. The ball movement is not where it has been. We’ve been for most of the year a top six defensive rebounding team. The last several games that’s really dipped. We’ve played very fast in transition, but some of our transition numbers have dropped off. And we have not been as efficient on the break these last five, 10 games games.
“The question of playing down to the level (of an opponent); we don’t have the luxury of doing that against anybody,” Donovan reminded. “If we’re not really good in terms of the detail and how we need to play, it’s very hard for us. It’s the toughness to get lost in the competition. We’re not reacting, we are careless with the basketball. I know were better than what we’ve played and at some point you have to have some fight and competitiveness when things don’t go your way. I really like this team. I don’t know what will happen (at trade deadline), but I really like this group. They’ve done a 180 in terms of how we’ve tried to play stylistically. We’ve had threes games in a row where I don’t think we’ve played to our identity, but for the most part this group has been pretty good. We’ve had some games slip away, but we’ve bounced back. So I’ve enjoyed the group. We have to have more resiliency in the face of adversity.”
So the old man, 14-year veteran Vučević, decided to try to make his teammates see. That no matter how great the challenge may be, it takes perseverance to overcome hardship. And that even in defeat, it’s about the battle. No fish stories from Vooch post game.
“It was a build up of things that we haven’t been doing well,” said Vučević. “It’s all things that we can control, that coaches keep pointing out to us, and we just don’t do them. We have to understand it’s the details that make a difference at this level. Everybody who is in this league is a good player; some better than others, for sure. But it’s not huge margins. Mistakes are going to happen. It’s part of it, but we made too many of them. Tonight, it showed.
“I felt like it was a good moment to say it because we needed to understand why we lost,” Vučević said. “It wasn’t because we didn’t shoot the ball well. It was because we didn’t do the things we can to control the game. That’s why we lost against Sacramento, why we lost (to the Pelicans) and a lot of games that we’ve lost. You can do all the right things and still lose, but tonight we didn’t do any of them and they took it to us. It had to do with us not doing what we had to do.”
So Vooch had to do what he did; now will they? Can they? Can they fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields, the streets, the hills…on the basketball court?
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