INDIANAPOLIS – Hopefully, Arturas Karnisovas was taking a good hard look on Wednesday.
There was one team on the court of the Gainbridge Fieldhouse that understood playing with pace and still getting consistent looks on the offensive end when the three-pointer wasn’t falling.
There was one team that took pride in playing defense and doing so with physicality.
There was one team that was actually heading in an upward trajectory.
And it wasn’t Karnisovas’.
Just another reminder for the Bulls’ executive vice president of basketball operations that mediocrity and inconsistency is not the model for staying pat in the NBA.
On a night in which the Bulls lost the turnover battle 18-8 and were outscored in the paint 76-54, the emotional comeback win over the Spurs just two nights earlier seemed very long ago. A 129-113 whooping by the Pacers will do that to a team.
“Definitely not,” Bulls forward Patrick Williams said, when asked about the readiness of him and his teammates at the tip.
Which was really disappointing because it sounded very much like what happened last week in Washington when the Bulls appeared to not understand the urgency in which they need to start an NBA game with.
“That’s on us,” Williams said. “That’s our job to show up and play. We didn’t do that for the whole night. It’s the best league in the world. You can’t just show up and expect to win, show up and half-ass it, expect to compete and win the game no matter how much talent you have.”
Williams wasn’t shy about first pointing the finger at himself, missing some early shots, while allowing Pascal Siakam to get two early baskets off of him.
“The turnovers started early, we never really found a flow, so we were always back on our heels for most of the game,” coach Billy Donovan said.
What Donovan could count on – and what he counts on a lot – is that his players didn’t quit. There was a 19-9 run to start the fourth quarter to at least keep the Pacers mop-up players in their warm-ups and on the bench, but from a competitive standpoint, very little went right for the visiting team.
That was evident very early on, as Indiana (20-18) built a double-digit lead in the opening stanza, holding the Bulls to 8-of-22 shooting (36%) and turning them over seven times.
A theme throughout the evening, as the deficit grew to as large as 34 by the third quarter.
Even when the Bulls did show a pulse late in the fourth and cut the lead to 14 on a Coby White three pointer with 8:07 left, it wasn’t like it made Indiana blink. They simply buttoned it down and went back on the attack.
A Thomas Bryant dunk and then an Andrew Nembhard finger roll helped build the Pacers lead back to 21 within two minutes.
While there wasn’t much that went right for Donovan and his players in the loss, he could at least still count on Zach LaVine making the effort to try and be a two-way player. LaVine led the Bulls in scoring with a game-high 31 points, giving him 30-plus points in four-straight games.
While none of the Bulls starters could brag about the defense they played on the night, LaVine at least tried to make his presence felt on that end.
“The way our team is, he’s definitely done it,” Donovan said of LaVine’s improved defensive effort this season. “And the one thing that is a little bit unfair for him is when we had Alex (Caruso) and we had (a healthy) Lonzo (Ball), those guys were absorbing a lot of those (assignments). We’ve kind of put that on him and he’s handled it really well. I think he’s playing both ends at a high level.”