Healthy Bulls roster has locker room feeling confident ... and feisty
The adjectives were flying around the locker room after the comeback win in Atlanta on Tuesday.
The trash talk was flying around the court all night before that.
Whether it was Josh Giddey telling Hawks All-Star Trae Young he’s “(bleeping) tiny” after he scored on him in the post, Matas Buzelis staring down the entire Atlanta bench after a thunderous dunk, or Ayo Dosunmu flat-out running at Young after a pat on the behind, looking to choke him out, the Bulls were feeling themselves before the Christmas break.
“We’re resilient,” Dosunmu said of the current state of the Bulls. “We keep fighting.”
Considering the Bulls looked down-and-out just over a week ago, losing seven straight since late November and looking like dead-team walking, to beat Cleveland at home on Dec. 17, and then go on a three-game winning streak on the road against the Cavaliers and two in Atlanta, spoke volumes about this team still having confidence in the product.
“This has been about continuing to stay together, continuing to get better,” Dosunmu said. “We understood that (the losing streak) was not the best basketball that we were playing, but we all knew what we were capable of. We put it together and have been playing a great stretch of basketball. Now we’ve got to just keep doing it.”
Which isn’t a stretch at this point.
The Bulls come out of this holiday pause with six consecutive home games, starting with Philadelphia. Then they welcome Milwaukee, Minnesota, New Orleans, Orlando and Charlotte into town. Not exactly the best of the best.
“The first thing is it’s nice to have everyone healthy,” Giddey said of the recent surge.
That is the first thing with this team and maybe the most important. Besides rookie Noa Essengue lost for the year with season-ending shoulder surgery, for the first time since training camp coach Billy Donovan has all his pieces on the chessboard.
“Our depth has been a luxury for us all year and we’re finally able to use that now,” Giddey continued. “I thought that even in the losing stretch we had we started to head in the right direction with the habits we were building. The things we were doing on the floor just wasn’t translating to wins, and then we got four in-a-row against good teams – Cleveland and Atlanta – so we’re happy with it, get the break, and get ready to go against Philly.”
All good points by Giddey, but also a reminder of the elephant in the room that executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas seems to be ignoring. The fact that the team plays its best basketball only when it’s completely whole shows the fragility of the roster.
A roster, oh by the way, that is made up of six unrestricted free agents – Coby White, Dosunmu, Nikola Vucevic, Zach Collins, Kevin Huerter and Jevon Carter – and two possible decisions to be made on the rookie contracts of Dalen Terry and Julian Phillips.
The February trade deadline is bearing down on the Association and Karnisovas can’t bring everyone back, nor should he. So does he dare trade someone that could mess with the depth or just ride this roster out in hopes of getting out of mediocrity and promised nothing back come July free agency?
The second option would be roster malpractice, but Karnisovas is no stranger to that.
The Bulls do currently have the 10th toughest remaining schedule so maybe Karnisovas will have his decision made for him by late January.
With Giddey and Dosunmu throwing around adjectives like “resiliency” and “tenacious,” however, maybe he won’t.