The Bulls' head coach got honest, acknowledging his team's dire need for improvement.
As December nears its midpoint, the Chicago Bulls' 6-1 start to the season seems like a distant memory.
Billy Donovan's squad now sits 11th in the Eastern Conference with just a 9-14 overall record. The Bulls' ongoing seven-game skid features five losses among the league's bottom seven teams, and the season is close to going fully off the rails in Chicago.
The Bulls forced everyone to recalibrate their expectations after they flew out of the gates during October and early November. That glimpse of what could be is what has made the latest stretch so disappointing, but perhaps it was that start to the season that was the outlier, and Chicago is now regressing to reality.
Donovan hasn't pulled any punches regarding his team's recent struggles. The Hall-of-Fame coach spoke truthfully about the woes following the Bulls' Wednesday practice, saying they need to raise their intensity to a different level.
"People want to sit there and say, 'Well, you lost to New Orleans, they've got a bad record, Indiana, bad record,'" Donovan said. "I don't think we're any different than those teams. We've got to play really, really well to win every single night. We're not just gifted to walk in there [where] if we show up, we're going to win games. It's really, really hard. We need everybody. We have to play at a high level."
As a team without a true star, the Bulls' margin for error needs to be much smaller than it has been. The group must buy in collectively in order to prove that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that has not been the case.
Unfortunately for them, the Bulls are getting worked in many of the "hustle stats" that decide close-margin games. Chicago ranks 23rd in the NBA in offensive rebounding rate, 24th in loose balls recovered, 25th in offensive rebounds allowed, 26th in second-chance points allowed, 27th in points in the paint allowed and 29th in deflections.
And thanks to those lapses, the Bulls are now just 3-7 in clutch games since starting 4-0.
Various injuries to the team's rotation have stretched Chicago's lineup thin — a significant factor in the losing streak — but Donovan isn't viewing that as an excuse. Even if players like Kevin Huerter, Tre Jones, Isaac Okoro and Jalen Smith hadn't missed the past several games, the Bulls' play is still not at the caliber of a potential playoff team.
"I try to look at it always through the lens of, what are the controllable things we can be better at as a team?" Donovan said. "The guys being out, they've got nothing to do with being 18th the last 10 games on turnovers. Good players being out definitely hurts your team, but I always try to look at it as, 'Here's our team. This is what we have to do. This is how we've got to play. We've got to do it at a higher level.'"
Chicago will have the opportunity to snap its seven-game losing streak in Charlotte on Friday night.