The Chicago Bulls aren’t running from reality.
After opening the season on a winning streak and a losing streak, the Bulls know there’s no margin for error.
This isn’t criticism. It’s a simple pragmatism, something that coach Billy Donovan delivered with flat certainty after the Bulls crumbled to the Detroit Pistons in their fourth consecutive loss Wednesday: “We’re not talented enough not to play desperate.”
This isn’t new language. Coaches and players alike have adopted this blunt approach to discussing their roster — and the requirements that come with it. The Bulls don’t have an All-Star. This is the first full season of a reconstruction project around young talent. And that means this roster doesn’t have any wiggle room. There isn’t a star waiting in the wings to bail this team out of a bad game. The price of a win is steeper.
“We’re not the most talented team out there,” forward Isaac Okoro said. “We got to beat teams with our hustle, our grit, being relentless for the whole 48 minutes of the game, with our toughness.”
But what exactly does it mean for a team to embrace the limitations of its construction?
The Bulls found clarity in building an identity around the balanced responsibilities of their roster. That identity — scramble on defense, win the boards, beat opponents down the court, hunt the extra pass — weathered the injuries of Coby White and Josh Giddey. The Bulls generate more than two-thirds of their points through assisted shots. Six different players average 14 or more points per game.
“You look around the NBA and in the past, teams that people don’t look at as talented — they still win games by just doing the dirty work,” Okoro said. “No one on our team is going to come in and score 30, 40 points every single night. As a collective, we all have to buy in as a team. Everyone has to come and contribute in whatever their role is. Everyone knows their role on the team. They’ve got to be great in that role.”
But the Bulls are still struggling to translate clarity into results. The work starts at the beginning. While the Bulls have set a decently competitive pace on offense this season — ranking 11th overall in scoring with 118.6 points per game — this relative offensive success has been diminished by slow starts.
The Bulls rank in the bottom third of the NBA in first-quarter scoring, averaging only 28.7 points in the first 12 minutes of their games. That number dropped to 25.7 first-quarter points over the last six games, a span in which the Bulls dropped five losses — and their sole win in that span required a massive comeback effort after the Bulls fell into a 24-point deficit against the Philadelphia 76ers.
At the same time, the Bulls gave up an average of 31.5 points to their opponents in the first quarter. Chicago’s first-quarter scoring and opponent scoring both rank eighth-worst in the NBA, creating a negative margin of 5.8 points.
Some teams have the luxury of fighting from behind. The Bulls know they aren’t one of them.
“It feels like we’re just casually walking into games where we shouldn’t be doing that,” Okoro said. “From the start of the season, our identity is being the most conditioned team from the start of the game, so by the fourth quarter, their legs are tired. We have to bring the energy from the start of the game.”
Even with the sluggishness of these recent starts, the Bulls still feel they’ve struck on something uniquely effective in their style of play this season. Only one of Chicago’s first five losses — a blowout to the undermanned Detroit Pistons — disappointed Donovan. The other losses encapsulated the difficulty of slowing the most talented rosters in the league, an inevitability the coach had already accepted before the season began.
The Bulls are closer than expected to their ideal of outplaying their talent ceiling. And that’s a meaningful step for this team — especially with Giddey and White returning to their roles this week.
“It’s the idea that collectively doing it together, helping each other on both ends, maybe you can offset a team that’s got incredible talent,” Donovan said. “I really, really believe that if guys play together like that, you can play with anybody. This is a group of guys that understand and value the importance of having to rely on each other.”
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