The Chicago Bulls may have had an NBA first on Wednesday night following their season-opener against the Oklahoma City Thunder. After taking a 35-33 lead to end the first quarter, Chicago was steamrolled by Oklahoma City, as they scored only 69 points in the final three quarters.
The Thunder didn’t stop scoring as they ended up winning the game 124-104, earning a victory over their former head coach, Billy Donovan. It was such a frustrating loss for the Bulls that a players-only meeting was held in the locker room after the game.
Donovan entered the locker room after the loss and discussions were already being had. The players asked if they could have the room to talk amongst themselves and he agreed, exiting after the request.
“I’m not going to sit there and say that it was bad, like people were tearing up the locker room,” Donovan said. “It was nothing like that. They were in there talking. I walked in and they said, ‘Hey, Coach, can we talk?’ I said sure and I left.’
“There’s nothing personal about any of this stuff. These guys do care, and they want to be better, but they know there’s habits they’ve got to change, and they’ve got to break. And they’re talking about trying to do that collective as a group.”
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Having a players-only meeting after Game 1 of an 82-game season certainly isn’t how an NBA franchise wants to get things started. For the Bulls, that signals the beginning of the end for this current core group of players.
Inexplicably, the front office brought back nearly the entire rotation from a team that lost in the NBA Play-In Tournament last year. Veterans Torrey Craig and Jevon Carter were added to the bench unit, but the Bulls returned their top seven players in minutes played from the 2022-23 season.
The frustrations that were shown in Game 1 are not shocking. This was a team that struggled last season; it is hard to envision Craig and Carter moving the needle enough that the Bulls would move into that next tier of teams in the Eastern Conference.
“Guys want to win,” Bulls guard Zach LaVine said after Wednesday’s game. “You put up a game like this in game 1, you’re going to have some conversations. Guys are frustrated and you should be. … It’s a good thing, but sucks that it happened game 1. It happened, and we got to go from there.”
Where do the Bulls go from here? This team hasn’t come close to replicating the success it had when Lonzo Ball was on the court as the starting point guard. Ball isn’t walking through those doors to help any time soon as he has already been ruled out for the reason as he continues rehabbing his balky knee.
While the discussions in the locker room don’t sound like they were too heated, on the court, things were. Donovan and center Nikola Vucevic got into a heated exchange on the bench in the third quarter for all to see. Vucevic admits that he may have been overly aggressive with his approach, and Donovan felt he himself was at fault as well.
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“Those happen in the heat of the moment,” Vucevic said. “You’re trying to win, you’re trying to do what you can to help your team win. I didn’t like what was going on.”
Donovan added: “I got all the respect in the world for Vooch. He felt a certain way and I said what I felt. And he’s probably not wrong for feeling the way he did, but how do you channel that in a way that galvanizes the group and lifts them up. In the moment, maybe I could’ve handled it better with him and maybe he could have handled it better with me. It wasn’t anything disrespectful or anything else. I think he was just kind of frustrated with the way we were playing, and I didn’t blame him.”
While Donovan said he was happy about how his team discussed their issues on Wednesday night, this could be a sign of things to come. If frustrations are this high in Game 1, how will it look if the Bulls go on a losing streak? In Year 4 as the head coach of the Bulls, it would be fair to say that Donovan may be on the hottest coaching seat in the NBA at the onset of the season.
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