Why no, everything is not fine with the Chicago Bulls. Thanks for asking.
Following the team’s Wednesday night loss to the Atlanta Hawks, Jimmy Butler and Dwyane Wade ripped their teammates for a seeming lack of effort, per the Chicago Tribune‘s K.C. Johnson:
I wish I could say that everyone in here is going to go home and not eat tonight. I can’t say that. I don’t know that they care enough,” Wade said. “Games are supposed to hurt. You’re not supposed to sleep. You’re not supposed to want to talk to anybody. I don’t know if that is in guys in this locker room. Hopefully, they can prove me wrong. But I will challenge them to see if losses like this hurt.
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Butler, whose 40 points featured a four-point play, jumped on the pile.
“If you don’t come in this (expletive) pissed off after you lose any game, something is wrong,” he said. “This is your job. This is what you’re supposed to love to do, and I don’t think that everybody looks at it that way. I want to play with guys who care, guys who play hard, who want to do well for this organization, who want to do whatever it takes to win.
This is most definitely going to go over well inside the Bulls’ locker room.
Okay, no it isn’t. But Butler and Wade aren’t necessarily wrong. The Bulls’ point guard situation is a marinating disaster, Nikola Mirotic appears disinterested as all hell and, well, the team isn’t winning.
This loss to the Hawks dropped the Bulls to 23-24. They have yet to consistently separate themselves on the offensive or defensive end and are now clinging to a one-game lead on the Eastern Conference’s eighth and final playoff spot.
Anything less than a postseason cameo will be a failure for this veteran-stocked team. And if the Bulls continue down this path in the coming weeks, they’ll fall out of that playoff picture. That, in turn, might prompt the front office to stage a roster shakeup ahead of the Feb. 23 trade deadline—as opposed to waiting until the offseason for a chance to blow this up. So yes, it’s easy to understand Butler’s and Wade’s frustrations, particularly when they are, for the most part, doing their own jobs, and then some.
