The Chicago Bulls have now lost three games in a row as they fell at home on Wednesday against the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks pulled ahead for good in the second quarter of this one and they never looked back, cruising to a 110-94 victory. Chicago is starting to slip a little bit as a losing streak is officially underway, and Nikola Vucevic was not happy after the game.
Nikola Vucevic was the voice of the locker room on Wednesday night in Chicago. The Bulls aren't expected to win a championship or anything like that this year, but the team definitely feels like they are leaving a lot meat on the bone. Vucevic wants to see things cleaned up.
“It’s right here to define the season,” Coby White said, according to an article from NBA.com. “It’s going to define the true character of this (locker) room. Are we going to let it spiral and dwindle and keep going downhill? Or take a stand and next game come out ready to compete? Vooch said it all postgame. (He said) stop doing the dumb stuff that we’ve been doing. Stop not boxing out, not rebounding, stop with the switch confusion, stop being back cut. Vooch is 100% correct. He spoke up, and he dug into us. Coach didn’t have to say much; Vooch hit on everything. We’ve got to stay together as a team. That was one of the messages after Vooch spoke.”
There's no question about it, the Bulls are facing some adversity right now. It's on them to get back on track, and that's what Nikola Vucevic was preaching.
“With stuff not going your way, going through adversity…the games are going to keep coming,” White continued. “We’re the only ones who can dig ourselves out of this hole. It’s not the coaches, the fans. It’s on us. Like Vooch said, being in the right spot, boxing out, communicating on defense; that’s the stuff you can control and we haven’t been doing that. We have to figure it out as a team. You’re going to have ups and downs during the season; you have to stay the course. Right now we’re going through a storm. So we have to figure out how to get through it and what is blocking us from being great. We needed him to speak up, we needed him to lead us. It was good for us, for the team, good for Vooch to get it off his chest and hold everyone accountable. And he put himself in there also, holding himself accountable.”
Vucevic pinpointed a lot of the issues himself, and Coby White added some things as well. He thinks that a big problem lately has been the pace at which the Bulls are playing.
“Not playing to our identity,” White said. “A lot is the pace. We’re not playing with that same thrust, that same pace which created a lot of downhill attacks, open threes, getting out in transition.”
With the loss, the Bulls are now 18-23 on the year, but they remain in 10th place in the Eastern Conference which would get them into the play-in tournament.
Nikola Vucevic and the Bulls will look to get back on track on Friday when they host the Charlotte Hornets, a team that has just nine wins. That has to a victory for Chicago.