The Kings had DeMar DeRozan eager to take on his former team Sunday. That Bulls loss was explainable.
The loss to the Pelicans on Tuesday was a bit tougher to swallow since they came to the United Center as an eight-win team.
But the Hawks? They were coming off a win Tuesday night over the Suns but were without Trae Young (illness), Jalen Johnson (shoulder) and De’Andre Hunter (left foot) — their three top scorers — plus Larry Nance (right hand) and rookie Zaccharie Risacher (illness), who account for about 20 points.
Surely, the Bulls weren’t in for another letdown, right?
They weren’t.
This was a flat-out embarrassment.
Behind a game-high 27 points from guard Keaton Wallace, a two-way contract player, the undermanned Hawks (21-19) handed the Bulls their third straight defeat Wednesday, beating them 110-94 at home.
Bulls veteran center Nikola Vucevic had a serious talk with the rest of the locker room afterward.
“Vooch said it all postgame,” guard Coby White said. “[He said] stop doing the dumb stuff that we’ve been doing. Stop not boxing out, not rebounding, stop with the switch confusion, stop the back-cuts. And Vooch is 100% correct. He spoke up, and he dug into us.”
Asked if he was fiery or calm, Vucevic described it as somewhere in between.
“It was just a buildup of things we haven’t been doing well,” he said. “There’s things that we control that Coach [Billy Donovan] keeps pointing out to us, and we just don’t do them. We focus on the wrong things, and we have to understand that it’s the details that make a difference at this level. For the team we have, those little things have to be done all the time.”
Signs of a bad night were there early, despite Donovan’s warnings.
“Obviously you talk about [the Hawks being short-handed], but for us, we’re not good enough to do that against anybody, so I don’t even look at it as playing up or playing down,” he said. “If we don’t play to our potential, it really doesn’t make a difference who is out there. So we’ve got to play to what we’ve tried to establish as our identity most of the year, and I think for the most part, we’ve done a pretty good job.”
Just not Wednesday. In the first quarter, the Bulls (18-23) turned the ball over seven times, continuing an ugly trend from a night earlier. They turned the ball over six more times in the second quarter but compounded their issues by shooting 1-for-10 from three-point range and were outscored 34-22 in the quarter.
The Bulls are used to digging out in the second half this season. The Hawks, however, weren’t having it. While the Bulls were better with ball security after halftime, they still had scoring issues and shot 2-for-8 from three-point range.
They attempted one last desperate push with just over three minutes left, but forward Patrick Williams missed a floater. Then, after a Hawks turnover, guard Zach LaVine missed a back shot from inside the paint.
“Right now, we’re just not playing with the same pace that we’ve been playing with all year,” said White, who led the Bulls with 16 points. “Vooch said what needed to be said, but we have to start controlling what we need to control.”