The Bulls have to make some lineup moves after recent injuries.
This season has gone better than a lot of people expected for the Chicago Bulls, but one thing that has not gone well in Chicago is injury trouble. The Bulls have had numerous key players go down with injuries this season, some of them multiple times, and they are in the midst of a rough stretch right now. A couple of key players that are currently out for the Bulls are Zach LaVine and Patrick Williams.
Despite the injury trouble, the Bulls are still 22-25 on the year and fighting for a playoff spot. That is because this team has responded well to injuries so far this year. The necessary lineup changes have been made, and guys have stepped up when they needed to. It isn’t easy, however, and Bulls head coach Billy Donovan recently discussed the challenges that come with these changes.
“We ended up playing Andre [Drummond] and Vooch [Nikola Vucevic] to start the Portland game a little bit together,” Billy Donovan said to the media on Tuesday. “They [Portland] ended up going small immediately. So, sometimes teams will adjust to that, and we’ll stay with it for a period of time. Andre [Drummond] picked up his second foul, so got him off the floor. I’m not opposed to doing that, that could be a possible lineup that we can look at some. Alex [Caruso] has been a guy that’s absorbed a lot of those minutes there. Certainly, those two guys out make us a lot smaller on the wing position, especially defensively. Alex [Caruso] has done a really good job guarding a multitude of guys in the league, so he’s played everybody. So, we got a lot of confidence in him. Julian [Phillips] is going to be the other guy, that hopefully can give us a little bit of size at that position. Then, as I mentioned, the possibility of having Andre [Drummond] out there. But some of that’s going to be matchup-based and what it looks like [out there]. I think if you look at Portland’s rotations, what they had been doing, they were somewhat big at the power forward spot. We felt pretty comfortable about doing that, but right when we did that Chauncey [Billups] ended up immediately going small and keeping Jerami Grant at the power forward spot – and it’s a little bit more of a difficult matchup because he’s moving around a lot more than some of the teams that are playing with two traditional bigs. So, some of that’s going to be matchup-based. But we’ll have to use Alex [Caruso], we’ll have to use Julian [Phillips], Dalen [Terry]. You know, we’re going to have to do it by committee.”
As you can see, finding a lineup that works for the Bulls isn’t easy when they are dealing with all of these injuries. They will have to adjust for at least a couple more weeks, and it will be interesting to see how they perform during this stretch.
