CHICAGO (670 The Score) – Bulls coach Billy Donovan doesn't often directly call out his veteran stars, but he certainly challenged them Friday evening ahead of Chicago's game against Orlando.
Donovan spent a good portion of his 16-minute pregame media session putting the burden on DeMar DeRozan, Zach LaVine and Nikola Vucevic for the struggling Bulls' poor starts to games lately, which have set the tone as Chicago (6-9) has lost five of its past six games and been blown out in its last two.
"I've got a lot of respect on a lot of level for Vooch, DeMar and Zach, of who they are as players," Donovan said. "We're never going to be as good as we can be as a team until, in my opinion, until those three guys really drive the opening part of the game. I think it's very, very easy to look at maybe Ayo (Dosunmu) being a young player or Patrick (Williams) and Patrick not being aggressive enough, hey, we're just going to throw a guy in there. Those three guys are important to our team, and if we're working around them so to speak like you're talking about, I don't know if we can ever get to where we need to get to. And I don't mind saying this because I don't look at it as pressure on them. It's just what we've got to do as a basketball team. That's the expectation, that's the standard.
"Those three guys, I've got a lot of trust, confidence and belief in them that they've got to raise the level of everybody else around them in my opinion.
"For us to be the team that we want to be, those guys have to really, really drive it I think. And that's not to sit there and say it takes any responsibility off myself as a coach and/or any of the other players on the team. It's all of us. But those (bad) starts, I think it's got to be driven by those guys."
Donovan indicated he has no plans to change the Bulls' starting lineup of Vucevic, Williams, DeRozan, LaVine and Dosunmu just yet, though he would revisit that if the team's struggles persisted. That starting five has a -7.4 net rating together this season, getting outscored by 20 points in 129 minutes together, according to NBA.com. The Vucevic-DeRozan-LaVine trio has a -12.3 net rating, getting outscored by 58 points in 219 minutes together.
The Bulls need to take care of the ball better and close out better on opposing teams' 3-point attempts, Donovan said in specifically citing where the group could improve. He repeatedly challenged his top three players in a number of responses to follow-up questions.
"They're our leaders of our team," Donovan said. "They're veteran guys that have been in the league for a long time. They've got to basically drive, in my opinion, whatever it is – defense, offense, everything. We've got to be able to get back and we've got to be able to contest threes. We've got to be able to rebound. We've got to be able to defend without fouling. We've got to be able to not turn the ball over and run offense and generate good shots. If shots aren't falling, that can't bleed into our defense. To me, your veteran guys drive that mentality, and we need them to drive that mentality."
Cody Westerlund is a sports editor for 670TheScore.com and covers the Bulls. Follow him on Twitter @CodyWesterlund.
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