CHICAGO (670 The Score) – What was arguably the Bulls’ worst performance and effort of the season led to veteran center Nikola Vucevic airing frustration in a postgame speech to his team, which is in a rut at the halfway point.
The mostly healthy Bulls sputtered to a 110-94 loss to the extremely shorthanded Hawks on Wednesday evening at the United Center, where a pair of Atlanta players on two-way contracts in guard Keaton Wallace (27 points) and wing Daeqwon Plowden (19 points off the bench) led the way to victory. The Hawks played without their three leading scorers in Trae Young, Jalen Johnson and De’Andre Hunter, who were all sidelined by injury.
Most frustrating to Bulls coach Billy Donovan and Vucevic wasn’t that they were lit up by little-known names but rather that Chicago coughed up 20 turnovers and allowed 14 offensive rebounds to Atlanta. That led to 22 points off turnovers for the Hawks and 27 second-chance points in a game the Bulls never led.
Afterward, Vucevic shared his displeasure as the Bulls are now riding a three-game losing streak. Vucevic also took blame himself while sharing his message, Bulls guard Coby White said.
“It was a build-up of things that we haven’t been doing well,” Vucevic said. “It’s all things that we can control, that coaches keep pointing out to us, and we just don’t do them. We focus on the wrong things. We have to understand it’s the details that make a difference at this level. Everybody in this league is a good player, some better than others for sure, but it’s not huge margins. For us in this position we’re in, the team we have, those little things, we have to do them all the time. Mistakes are going to happen. It’s part of it, but we made too many of them. Tonight, it showed.”
Not long before Vucevic spoke to reporters, Donovan also expressed his frustration with his team’s inattention to details, citing a failure to box out consistently and a series of defensive lapses in which the Hawks beat the Bulls on back cuts.
“We have razor-thin margins here right now,” Donovan said. “So that’s the disappointing part about tonight – this was addressed before the game. And when I say ‘before the game,’ just the things that we need to do and the response that we need to have.
“We’re not reacting. We’re not reacting in transition. We’re not reacting when shots go up. We’re careless with the basketball.”
Vucevic didn’t feel like there were any deficiencies in the Bulls’ game plan as both teams played on the second night of a back-to-back and Chicago shot a miserable 6-of-27 from 3-point range. He thought the problems stemmed primarily from the Bulls’ mental lapses regarding fundamentals.
Vucevic also stressed the Bulls “can’t get bored with the simple things.”
“I felt like it was a good moment to say it because we needed to understand why we lost,” Vucevic said of speaking up in the postgame locker room. “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. It was the things that we can control regardless of shooting, and we didn’t do those. And that’s why we lost. And that’s why we lost against Sacramento (on Sunday) as well and that’s why we lost (to the Pelicans on Tuesday) and a lot of games that we’ve lost – because we didn’t do what we should do.”
The Bulls dropped to 18-23 with the loss and remain 10th in the East. They’re on a 36-win pace at the halfway point of the season.
“You’re just not going to win basketball doing the stuff that we’re doing,” Donovan said.
Cody Westerlund is an editor for 670TheScore.com and covers the Bulls. Follow him on Twitter @CodyWesterlund.