PHILADELPHIA — Tristan Thompson has only been a Bull for a few weeks, but he definitely brings an interesting perspective.
It’s debatable on how accurate the big man was, but it’s definitely interesting.
After the 15-point loss to Philadelphia on Monday, Thompson was discussing the current season-high five-game losing streak the team was crawling through. According to the veteran center, there’s a defensive blueprint going around on how to stop the Bulls, and everyone seems to be studying it.
“I’m making an assumption, but I think how well this team has started off compared to last season, I think people — not our team, I don’t think anyone in our locker room, anyone on our staff is panicking — you’ve got to understand that when you come out that hot in the first half of the season, teams are going to start prepping for you differently,’’ Thompson said. “Instead of treating it like, ‘Hey, a walk-through, we got the Bulls tonight.’ It’s ‘Hey this is a potential playoff matchup and we’ve got to throw some wrinkles in our scheme to see how they’ll react.’
“Memphis showed it first with how they played us defensively, and it continued on with Miami. And I think that film from Memphis has started to be sent from the video guys to those other playoff teams in the league and they’re going to have the same game plan coming in defensively. So we’ve got to make those adjustments.’’
Hold up.
While Thompson didn’t detail what that blueprint was from the Grizzlies — for obvious reasons — it’s safe to assume that the frequent double-teaming and blitzing they did on DeMar DeRozan was what he was referring to.
If DeRozan swung the ball to Zach LaVine, the defense was rotating to LaVine, leaving the corner three-pointer open. Basically, it was smother DeRozan, be prepared for LaVine, keep Nikola Vucevic covered with the big, and make anyone else on the Bulls roster beat them.
Because of Memphis’ athleticism and length they did a solid job of messing with DeRozan’s efficiency — he shot 10-of-29 — and the other Bulls players not named DeRozan or LaVine did shoot a combined 4-for-15 from three, so there’s some merit to that.
Where Thompson’s theory loses a bit of steam, however, was Memphis wasn’t the only team to play the Bulls this way. Miami has done that basically in all three meetings, Milwaukee attacked DeRozan in the fourth with only one player — Jrue Holiday, and Philadelphia gave the Bulls multiple defensive looks throughout the night, sometimes double-teaming DeRozan to get the ball out of his hands, but also throwing different individual players at him.
It’s not the blueprint that’s been dooming the Bulls as much as it’s the talent level of the opposing personnel.
But hey, give Thompson an A for effort. Maybe feeling like it’s an adjustment here, a tweak there, is better than facing the reality that four of the five teams in this streak are just better and more talented.
What coach Billy Donovan has to get them believing is that while help will be coming with Alex Caruso (wrist), Patrick Williams (wrist) and Lonzo Ball (knee), the immediate help has to come from the player currently looking in the mirror.
“We’ve had 16 games the entire year with Lonzo, Alex, Vooch, DeMar and Zach, 16-some games,’’ Donovan said. “Our guys are fighting and we can be better. I agree we have not performed really well against these [elite] teams and our margin for error against these teams is very small. Certainly Alex, Patrick and Lonzo make us better defensively.
“That’s not to say they are the cure for all this. And I’m not making excuses because we have to be better because we don’t know if we’ll even get whole.’’
