The larger theater of sports offers us cliches, truisms, and tidy expressions, assorted ways in which to capture the significance of various moments during a long and grueling season.
One such expression is this: Teams can afford to lose some games more than others.
Every game matters in a context of competition. Winning 55 games or losing 50 games are both built brick by brick, night after night. Miss one opportunity? Fine — just go get the next one. Yet, over the course of this 82-game journey, some games demand strong performances and victories.
Monday night at home, the Chicago Bulls faced just such a contest against the Brooklyn Nets.
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The backdrop to this battle could not have been any simpler: Saturday night, after a loss in New York against the Knicks, Chicago star Jimmy Butler said that head coach Fred Hoiberg needed to work harder. The words Butler used might not have been all that incendiary or uncharitable, but the fact that he went public with any kind of criticism in the first place represented a certain level of frustration with the way things were (and are) going in the Windy City. When that kind of view is pushed into the public sphere, brought outside a team’s inner sanctum, everyone notices. Pressure to perform immediately increases in the locker room… and among fans who realize the significance of a player calling out his head coach (no matter how gentle the actual language might have been).
Who’s right and who’s wrong — which we wrote about after Butler’s comments on Saturday — has a place in this discussion, but it’s not nearly as central to the Bulls’ situation as one might first think. Sure, it’s a natural point of interest to wonder if Butler should have called out Hoiberg… or if he could have made a more pointed criticism… or if Hoiberg is doing certain things to diminish his team’s chances of succeeding on a regular basis. However, at a certain point, those distinctions cease to matter if criticism from a star player is not accompanied by effective and resolute performances from the team.
Phrased differently and much more succinctly: Regardless of what you might think of Butler’s Saturday comments about Hoiberg, they will unquestionably become a detriment if the Bulls don’t respond well this week.
This leads us back to the tidy little expression above: Teams can afford to lose some games more than others.
Translated: The Chicago Bulls can afford to lose many games, but given their circumstances, they could not really afford to lose at home to the Nets on Monday night.
In light of everything that had swirled around them over the previous 48 hours, the Bulls had to win at the very least. Ideally, they had to play with the lucidity and crispness they had lacked against the Knicks and the Detroit Pistons.
They went 0 for 2.
Ruh-roh.
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Jimmy Butler didn’t play poorly. An 11-of-20 stat line should be good enough to win on most nights. However, Derrick Rose and Nikola Mirotic — a star and a badly needed role player — both scored only eight points. With Joakim Noah getting injured (although X-rays of his shoulder, taken after the game, turned out to be negative), and with Hoiberg struggling to find a bench rotation that works, Butler needed to be better than good on a team which desperately needs more offense.
Butler doesn’t need to play harder, even though he called on Hoiberg to coach harder. Butler just needs to be better… and on Monday night, he wasn’t.
It’s true that important teammates didn’t give him enough help, but Butler had a particular responsibility on Monday to make sure his team didn’t suffer after his comments changed the tone and temperature of the Bulls’ locker room. Given that Chicago was hosting the Nets, one of the worst teams in the league, this game should have given Butler the ability to dominate in crunch time, as opposed to merely putting forth a solid, above-average performance.
Butler’s lack of a convincing answer — combined with subpar showings from Rose and Mirotic — shouldn’t be seen as a searing long-term indictment of the Bulls. It should be viewed as a present-moment indictment of Butler’s Saturday-night remarks, and their inability to rally the roster against a bad opponent at home.
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We’re not even at Christmas Day, so it seems a bit premature to say that the Chicago Bulls face a crisis. The East is too bunched to think that the Bulls are in a dire situation — not yet.
However, after losing to the Nets on the heels of Saturday night’s explosive developments in New York, the Bulls certainly have to know that if they don’t patch things up in the next few weeks, they’ll enter the middle of January in deep trouble.
It’s time for Jimmy Butler, Derrick Rose, and everyone else in the Chicago locker room to rescue a season which feels more tenuous than at any point over the past two months.
