Chicago Bulls' Ceiling Is Unknown, but They're Confident Best Days Are Ahead
PORTLAND, Ore. — Just looking at the standings, it would be easy to think that the Chicago Bulls have things figured out. At 8-4, they’re third in the Eastern Conference and have won four of their last five games, with the loss coming at the hands of the undefeated Golden State Warriors.
But despite its solid record, this is a Bulls team that’s still figuring a lot of things out, still waiting to get healthy, still unsure of what its ceiling is—as it has been for the past several years.
Like in the last few years, the Bulls are wildly inconsistent, picking up a convincing win against the Oklahoma City Thunder and failing to score a single point in overtime against the Minnesota Timberwolves in a matter of days.
The players are the same, but the Bulls' performances can vary greatly depending on the night when you catch them, and that’s something they’re working to correct.
“I feel like if we play the way we’re capable of, we continually play hard and not forget how hard you have to play in order to win games on the road or at home, we’ll be fine,” Bulls head coach Fred Hoiberg said on Monday morning at team practice in Portland, a day before the third game of their four-game road trip.
“I like the group of guys that we have. A team-ball type of club.”
That’s been the book on the Bulls for a while now, even if they don’t always show it.
Under Tom Thibodeau, they were a group that stayed competitive when they had no right to, winning playoff series despite countless injuries to key players. They took on the identity of their coach, who embodied hard-nosed relentlessness—for better and for worse.
Despite coming into this season with most of the same players, this Bulls team was supposed to take on the identity of its new coach. It hasn’t done that yet, mostly because Hoiberg himself hasn’t figured out what that is yet.
And if the new-look Bulls haven’t yet discovered their identity, their ceiling will still be an unknown.
It's not that they aren’t trying.
“We should probably figure it out pretty soon,” Hoiberg said. "But if we get back to playing hard every night, and we get back to playing hard every day in practice, I think we’ll get back to being that hard-nosed … maybe not so much an underdog team anymore, but just a group of guys that are going to fight. I don’t think we bring that fight every single night. I think we’re starting to get back to that, but early on we weren’t the hardest-playing team every night. We always need, have to be the hardest-playing team.”
The Bulls have yet to play as a fully healthy team—Derrick Rose has missed the last two games, and Mike Dunleavy is still weeks away from returning after undergoing offseason back surgery.
With Rose’s inconsistent early play, it has been difficult for the Bulls to establish a clear hierarchy on the offensive end.
“I think on this team anybody can score the ball,” guard Jimmy Butler said. “So on any given night, a guy can take more shots than another guy, just depending on who is making more shots. I think that’s OK. I don’t think offense has been our problem. I think it’s been on the defensive end or it’s coming out sluggish, coming out with no energy. The offense is always going to be there because we get so much freedom. The defense and making sure we’re ready to play every night is the thing we’ve got to make sure we bring.”
Butler has been the glue that’s held the Bulls together in the early going, bringing the kind of elite two-way play that made him an All-Star last year. But outside of Butler, it’s been hard to count on anybody else on a night-to-night basis.
“I just think that at times we take for granted how talented we are as a whole and with all the guys upon this roster,” Butler said. “We think we can come out and just go through the motions at the beginning of a game, dig ourselves a little hole and think we can just pick it up at any point and time, and it just doesn’t work like that. You gotta come out from the jump and try and beat a team for the whole 48 minutes. I think we’ve been really good from the start of games these past few games, and come up short in a few, but I think if we keep pushing, keep playing hard all the time, we’re going to win games.”
Taking talent for granted has been the story for this group for years. Talent was never the issue, only consistent effort—through the Thibodeau era and now in the Hoiberg era. But the talent is still there, as is the sense that if the Bulls can just get everybody fully healthy and on the same page, this is a team that can do some damage in the spring.
The question, as always, is when that will be.
“There's a lot of room for growth with this team, and hopefully we'll continue to get better and better as the season goes on and play our best basketball at the end of the season,” Butler said. “But yeah, the execution's got to continue to get better. I know our guys have been kind of in and out of the lineup, we've had some difficulty with that, but it shouldn't matter who's on the floor. You should be able to go out and execute your plays.
“It will get better. I'm confident in that.”
