(670 The Score) The Bulls are a mere two games into the young season, and already the quotes referencing life-or-death scenarios have surfaced.
Such is the rhetoric when a team is utterly non-competitive, as the Bulls were in a 125-106 loss to the Pacers at the United Center on Saturday, three nights after an ugly setback to the Hawks in which they trailed by as many as 40 points.
“As young players, when you’ve experienced losing, it can beat you down,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said. “And the bottom line is, as they get further and further beaten down, they have to be responsible for their own rescue. If someone throws a life raft out there, you have to swim to it. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, bring it to me.’”
Donovan’s comments came after the Bulls produced a solid first quarter Saturday, only to be soon undone by a pair of huge Pacers runs. Indiana went on a 21-0 run in the second quarter to turn a six-point deficit into a 15-point lead, then an 18-0 run coming out of halftime to break open what was a 10-point game. It left the Bulls again ruing what went wrong, and it was once again a montage of physical, mental and even emotional mistakes to hear them reflect on the woes.
There were the 20 turnovers the Bulls coughed up, including two when the Pacers instituted a full-court press after free-throw attempts. It flummoxed rookie Patrick Williams, the inbounder launching the poor passes, and Coby White, the point guard who couldn’t get open to give Williams a cleaner window. There was the startling field-goal shooting discrepancy, as the Bulls shot 37.4% and the Pacers converted at a 55.9% clip.
There was the Pacers’ layup on a baseline inbounds play when the Indiana big men cleared the lane, Chicago’s big men took the bait and Bulls guard Zach LaVine trailed his man around a high screen, leaving the paint wide open. There was the theme of Pacers guards and wings probing into the paint time and again against little resistance, as Bulls perimeter defenders trailed around screens and their big men dropped deep in coverage, leaving comfortable space in which their foe operate.
Then there was the Bulls’ admission that they lacked fight, an intangible concept that’s difficult to quantify but one they cited over and over after the Pacers recorded 76 points in the paint.
“We’ve got to be responsible for digging ourselves back out of a hole,” Donovan said. “I do think it is a mentality. I do think it is a disposition. And I do think it is an attitude.”
It was a refrain that LaVine echoed on a night he was the team’s leading scorer with 17 points.
“The main thing is we got to continue to compete and be able to finish games,” LaVine said. “The frustrating part for me is we haven’t been even able to compete to finish the game. It’s almost been over in the third quarter.”
And why are the Bulls’ struggles snowballing so quickly into bigger runs for opponents?
“We got bad habits,” LaVine said. “We got to learn how to break them. We have some leadership out there, but we have to do a better job of it. To be honest, we have to fight. You can’t let those lapses go for that long and drift.”
In explaining how the Bulls’ emotional frustration affected their play during the Pacers’ big runs, guard Tomas Satoransky mentioned the team failed to organize itself properly amid its rut, exacerbating the struggles further. He also believed the Bulls’ offensive woes carried over to the defensive end.
"I feel like we live a lot in the past as a team," center Wendell Carter Jr. said of the Bulls. "You just got to move on from that."
While it was a low bar to clear after their dud against the Hawks, the Bulls actually felt as if they played better against the Pacers. Donovan and the players pointed to better organization offensively outside of the game-defining runs and improved help defense, however small it may have seemed.
Of course, the result was hardly any different. This game remained competitive into the third quarter instead of just the second, but the fact remains that the Bulls have played 24 minutes of basketball in the fourth quarter this season, and not a single one of them has been meaningful.
It’s early, and already the clock is ticking on the Bulls amid an 0-2 start. The most brutal part of their schedule begins in less than a week, so the troubles need to begin getting fixed when they host the Warriors (0-2) on Sunday night.
“Everybody wants to do good,” Satoransky said. “It’s a new coaching staff and new opportunity. But no one wanted to start that way. Obviously, everyone knows it takes time, but that just happened last year as well. We have to change it immediately. We can be saying always, ‘It’s next game, next we’re going to do better.’ It has to come immediately.”
Cody Westerlund is a sports editor for 670TheScore.com and covers the Bulls. Follow him on Twitter @CodyWesterlund.