The Kings had DeMar DeRozan wanting to exact some revenge. That was explainable.
New Orleans was a bit tougher to swallow, especially since they entered the United Center an eight-win team.
But Atlanta?
And not the 20-19 version that was just coming off a win over the Phoenix Suns. This was the Hawks roster that was without the likes of Trae Young (illness), Jalen Johnson (shoulder), De’Andre Hunter (left foot), Larry Nance (right hand) and rookie Zaccharie Risacher (illness).
That was Atlanta’s top three scorers, plus almost 20 combined points from Nance and Risacher.
Surely there couldn’t be yet another letdown. There wasn’t.
This was a flat-out embarrassment.
Thanks to 27 points from Keaton Wallace – a two-way contract player – the undermanned Hawks handed the Bulls their third straight loss, beating them 110-94 on Wednesday.
That’s why Bulls veteran Nikola Vucevic had a serious talk with the rest of the locker room afterwards.
“Vooch said it all postgame,” guard Coby White admitted. “(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.”
Vucevic was asked about if he gave his teammates “Fiery Vooch” or “Calm Vooch,” and described it as somewhere in between.
“Moreso because it was just a build up of things we haven’t been doing well,” Vucevic said. “There’s things that we control that Coach 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.”
The signs were there early, despite coach Billy Donovan warning his players beforehand.
“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,” Donovan 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 on Wednesday.
There was the first quarter where the Bulls turned the ball over seven times, continuing an ugly trend from a night earlier against New Orleans.
That was followed up by a second quarter in which they turned the ball over six more times, but compounded the issues by shooting an icy 1-of-10 from three-point range to allow the visiting team to outscore them 34-22 in the stanza.
No problem.
After all, the Bulls are used to digging their own graves and then finding a way to climb out of it in the second half.
The Hawks, however, weren’t playing along or providing ladders.
While the Bulls were better at ball security coming out of the halftime locker room, they still had scoring issues, evident by the 2-of-8 from three-point range.
The Bulls did attempt one last desperate push with just over three minutes left in the game, but Patrick Williams missed a floater and then after a Hawks turnover 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,” White added. “Vooch said what needed to be said, but we have to start controlling what we need to control.”