The Bulls telegraphed playoff aspirations when they swung a blockbuster trade for Nikola Vučević on March 25.
To reach those heights, they need to improve on the defensive end of the court. Fast.
“Defensively we just got to get better,” Thad Young said after the latest defeat, 121-116 at the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday. “Biggest thing is just getting the guys acclimated to how we play defensively. We’re still having some miscues on coverages and some of the stuff we are doing out there, but it’s simply because we haven’t had time to have practice time.”
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In their current five-game losing streak, Bulls opponents are scoring 116 points per game and shooting 50.9 percent — marks that rank 28th and last in the NBA, respectively.
But Young’s point is a prescient one. Three of those losses have come since the trade deadline, when the Bulls introduced five new players into their rotation, including a focal point in Vučević. In the NBA’s every-other-day 2020-21 schedule, on-court practice time can be sparse, and the quality of competition has been fierce of late.
“We’re trying to use time in shootarounds and stuff like that for practice time or going into a film session,” Young said.
But: “There is nothing like getting up and down the court and actually going through coverages and breaking a sweat, simulating game-like situations throughout the course of a one or two hour practice.”
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The Bulls are having to endure that learning process on the court, and it’s showing. The Spurs shot 17-for-22 in the restricted area in their blowout victory on March 26, as the Bulls offered little resistance on dribble-drives and rim finishes. Steph Curry poured in 32 points in 30 minutes in the Warriors’ runaway win on March 28, utilizing an inordinate amount of pick-and-rolls to torch the Bulls’ 28th-ranked defense in that action. And the Suns shot 56.8 percent from the floor on Wednesday behind a smooth 45-spot from Devin Booker.
“I didn’t think we had enough physicality at all,” head coach Billy Donovan said after the Suns game. “We weren’t into the ball at all. The ball is just coming right off screens and our guards have got to get into the ball and they have to guard the ball.”
Problems at the point of attack — especially in screening actions — have been a common trope for the Bulls all season, even as their defense improved for a stretch before the deadline. It adds to the troubling nature of post-deadline trends.
“We may takes some steps backwards to be honest with you, as we start to get maybe a little more accustomed to how we’re trying to play,” Donovan said after a recent practice, before reiterating: “But to be honest with you, I think you can always predicate how good you are defensively by how good you are on the perimeter. The guards that can blow-out a screen, the guards that can get in the ball and guard one-on-one in the open floor or even half-court, guys that can really enable bigs to go back to their man, when you have guys like that, that’s generally where your defense becomes very, very dominant.”
“It definitely starts with us guards,” said Patrick Williams after the Suns game. “Just making their guards more uncomfortable and not letting them get to their spots as easy.”
Even one of the new guys, Daniel Theis, noticed a lack of perimeter force upon first impressions.
“One thing for us as a team, we gotta be more physical, we gotta be more into the ball,” Theis said after practice before the Suns game. “It's a mindset. If you want to be into people's body and be physical and just kind of annoying too. If you're into them from the first second, you know it's not gonna be an easy game for them.”
The Bulls have also displayed a number of nasty defensive habits that have little to do with physicality, from cross-matching in transition to fouling 3-point shooters. Mental lapses in coverages, as Young alluded to, can be ironed out with more reps and time for the new-look group to mesh. And Donovan and Williams both noted they thought the team improved as the Suns game wore on.
But even as the Bulls cling to the tenth spot in the East — somehow, just four games out of sixth — with the sputtering Raptors and Wizards behind them, the time to deliver results is nigh. Just 26 games remain to make the postseason push spoken optimistically about in post-deadline pressers, and daunting matchups with the Jazz and Nets loom before their schedule softens.
“We definitely have enough talent in the locker room to become the defensive team that we want to be, that coach wants us to be and that we all think that we can be,” Williams said. “I think that's just a matter of guards getting into the ball, but also us just gelling with each other.”