Bulls get message after inconsistent play continues in lopsided loss to Pacers
INDIANAPOLIS — Hopefully Arturas Karnisovas, the Bulls’ executive vice president of basketball operations, was taking a good, hard look Wednesday night.
One team on the court at Gainbridge Fieldhouse understood how to play with pace and still got consistent looks on offense when the three-pointer wasn’t falling. One team took pride in playing defense with physicality. One team appeared to be on an upward trajectory.
And it wasn’t his.
The Bulls lost the turnover battle 18-8 and were outscored 76-54 in the paint as part of a 129-113 whooping by the Pacers — a loss that made their emotional comeback win over the Spurs two nights earlier seem like ages ago.
Were the Bulls ready at tipoff?
“Definitely not,” forward Patrick Williams conceded.
The result was similar to what happened last week in Washington, when the Bulls also appeared to not understand the need to start a game with urgency.
“That’s on us,” Williams said. “That’s our job to show up and play. We didn’t do that for the whole night.
“It’s the best league in the world. You can’t just show up and expect to win, show up and half-ass it, expect to compete and win the game no matter how much talent you have.”
Williams first pointed a finger at himself, having missed some early shots while allowing forward Pascal Siakam, who finished with a team-high 26 points, to score two early baskets off him.
“The turnovers started early,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said. “We never really found a flow, so we were always back on our heels for most of the game.”
What Donovan could count on — and what he counts on a lot — is that the Bulls didn’t quit. A 19-9 run to start the fourth quarter at least kept the Pacers’ mop-up players in their warm-up gear on the bench. But competitively speaking, little went right for Bulls (17-20). The Pacers (20-18) built a double-digit lead in the first quarter, holding the Bulls to 8-for-22 shooting (36%) with seven turnovers. The scoring deficit grew to as much as 34 points by the third quarter.
Even when the Bulls showed a pulse late in the game, cutting the lead to 14 on a three-pointer by guard Coby White with 8:07 left, the Pacers didn’t blink. A dunk by Thomas Bryant dunk and a finger-roll basket by Andrew Nembhard helped them build their lead back up to 21 within two minutes.
Guard Zach LaVine, making the effort to be a two-way player, led the Bulls with a game-high 31 points, giving him 30 or more in four straight games. None of the other Bulls starters could brag about their defense.
“The way our team is, he’s definitely done it,” Donovan said of LaVine. “And the one thing that is a little bit unfair for him is when we had Alex [Caruso] and we had [a healthy] Lonzo [Ball], those guys were absorbing a lot of those [assignments]. We’ve kind of put that on him, and he’s handled it really well. I think he’s playing both ends at a high level.”