It’s not a memo that Zach LaVine needs to be sent.
The Bulls guard is well aware of how important the next few months are to his basketball career.
Not because of a contract negotiation. No, the 25-year-old is all good in that department, locked up for the next two seasons. Not because of an expected coaching change coming to the Bulls, forcing LaVine to deal with his sixth different system in seven NBA seasons.
This is about legacy.
This is about LaVine never experiencing a playoff game. Not just being winless in a playoff game, but never even sniffing one.
For a guy that can fall out of bed and score 20 points in an NBA game and has athleticism that many in the league only dream about, to have never have played one minute in the postseason borders on, yes, bad luck, but also an indictment of his own shortcomings.
Now he enters an offseason where 22 teams will still be playing, while LaVine and his Bulls teammates have to figure out how to stay in shape individually, improve on their skills, and still have a voice of leadership that can try and get the roster together to continue building chemistry.
Good luck.
“I mean it sucks,’’ LaVine said of being left out of the 22-team restart bubble. “You’ve got to understand that it’s a weird time, especially with everything that’s going on right now, but it’s upsetting too. We weren’t even good enough to get into the play-in game, so it’s upsetting and it just shows that we’ve got to do a lot of things differently to get ourselves that recognition to get to that spot.’’
There will be a lot of responsibility on LaVine to do that.
That’s what goes with being the best player on a team.
While the team voted for Otto Porter and Thaddeus Young to be team captains last fall, the face of the organization was, and will remain, LaVine’s. With or without the “C’’ on his jersey, he knows that. That’s why turning this around falls mostly on him.
“For me personally, I can’t speak for other people, I’m just ready to become a winning team and a winning player,’’ LaVine said. “It’s my sixth year and I still haven’t got to the playoffs. If you want to put it in real terms, I haven’t played a really meaningful basketball game.
“Every game in the NBA is meaningful, but once the playoffs come that’s when you compete for championships, so, we haven’t had an opportunity to do that, I haven’t. So I’m just continuing, ready to progress my career and get better and try to reach that next step.’’
What should that entail?
First and foremost, figuring out the Lauri Markkanen conundrum.
The two came to the Bulls in the summer of 2017, and one can count on two hands how many games they’ve played where both of them dominated.
Heck, maybe one hand.
That’s been a huge issue. Markkanen’s best games have come with LaVine either in street clothes with an injury or just coming back from an injury and not fully engaged.
On paper, the two skillsets should be peanut butter and jelly. LaVine’s ability to attack a switch off of pick-and-roll or simply shoot long range over a defender slow to hedge on a Markkanen screen. And then Markkanen able to take as smaller player on the switch in the post or simply pick-and-pop for a three-pointer.
It should be a lethal combination.
Instead, it’s a broken squirt gun.
Ideally, LaVine gets together with Markkanen for a few weeks this summer – whether it’s in Chicago, LaVine’s home base of Washington, or even Los Angeles, and the two take steps toward further bonding on and off the court.
Something has to change, and it’s up to the best player on the Bulls roster to initiate that.
After all, there is a legacy at stake here.
