"Obviously you're disappointed," said Billy Donovan.
"It’s been mostly positive," Nikola Vučević added of his experience since being traded to the Bulls. "The only thing we didn’t achieve was the goal we set out when the trade happened."
The Bulls flew to New York Friday night hoping their Saturday matchup with the Brooklyn Nets would offer a chance to improve their long-shot playoff odds ahead of the last day of the regular season Sunday. But on Friday the Washington Wizards clinched their play-in bid with a win over the Cleveland Cavaliers, mathematically eliminating the Bulls from postseason contention for the fourth straight year.
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It's a brutally disappointing result after the team's freshly-installed front office swung a blockbuster deal for Vučević at the trade deadline -- in doing so both implicitly and explicitly signaling a desire to win now.
But with Saturday's 105-91 defeat to the Nets, the Bulls are 11-17 in 28 games since the deadline, worse by winning percentage than their 19-24 mark pre-deadline. On March 25, they sat 10th in the East, and 1.5 games clear of the Toronto Raptors for the final play-in spot. On May 15, the Charlotte Hornets, Washington Wizards and Indiana Pacers sit in a three-way tie for eighth, three games ahead of the Bulls.
"There were definitely things we could have done better," Vučević said. "When you make a trade midseason a lot of things change and sometimes it takes more time, and unfortunately we didn’t have that. It is disappointing we didn’t achieve our goal, so we have to be realistic and say we failed at that. But the only thing we can do is move forward and hopefully use that as motivation going into next year."
Vučević highlighted the Bulls' play after Zach LaVine returned from an 11-game COVID-19 absence as a positive on which to build. The team ripped a three-game winning streak following LaVine's return to the lineup, and had won four of five before the Wizards' clincher. LaVine was held out for Saturday's matchup with the Nets.
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"We saw a lot of positives of what we can be," Vučević said. "I think we just need that time to gel together and figure out how we can play, who we can be. Our identity, it just changed like overnight when the trade happened, so I think that we just need that time to kind of figure all that out. I think training camp next year will be big and the preseason to kind of work on those things and make sure we figure that out right away. Have a good start."
The roster could look a lot different by then, with an active offseason surely ahead. Executive vice president Artūras Karnišovas declared as much by saying at the deadline that the team was "not done" retooling. And that was before the disappointing post-deadline returns.
Vučević and Donovan's minds were simply on finishing the regular season out with Sunday night's bout with the Bucks. The Bulls can guarantee themselves a 26.3 percent chance of landing in the top four of the June 22 draft lottery with a loss in that game; they only retain their pick if it falls in the top four because of the Vučević trade. But such calculations are far from the mind of a player.
"We'll see tomorrow once we get together and talk, but I don't mind playing if they want me to play. Finish the season out in front of our fans," Vučević said when asked if he expects to sit out that game. "As far as the picks and all that. I've done that quite a few times and (in) my experience it doesn't matter much what pick you get. So I don't think anybody cares about that, we're more focused on finishing the season off strong and building it up for next year."