MIAMI — The Bulls easily could have let go of the rope when teammate Zach LaVine made it known just 12 games into the regular season that he was all for being elsewhere.
Heck, they could have tapped out in any of the embarrassingly bad five straight losses suffered in late November.
DeMar DeRozan has been around long enough to see plenty of teams fall into that trap before.
“Too much respect and pride to do that here,” the veteran forward said Saturday. “Too much respect for the coaching staff, how hard they work, understanding the time and effort that they put in. Having respect for one another, understanding the individual time and work that everyone put in. Just too damn much.”
It doesn’t mean this team is anywhere near where it should be in DeRozan’s opinion.
Jimmy Butler and the Heat provided a reminder of that in the second game of a back-to-back, as the former Bull hit the walk-off, 19-foot step-back jumper at the horn to give the home team a 118-116 win.
A heartbreaker? Considering the Bulls (10-17) were down as much as 15 in the second quarter and 11 to start the fourth, and yet had the lead after a Coby White basket with 1:28 left in the game, yes.
But also a daunting task to begin with, considering they were again without Alex Caruso (left ankle) and are now 0-5 in the last five games in which Caruso hasn’t played.
What this group continued to show was progress. Whether it was a season-high 25 points from Patrick Williams or another solid game from White, with the guard scoring 22 but also grabbing seven rebounds and handing out five assists.
What there also continued to be was an underrated coaching job by Billy Donovan and his staff, in DeRozan’s estimation.
The same Donovan whom the betting odds had being the first NBA coach fired this season a few weeks back.
Considering vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas never even thought about a coaching change with the poor start, and DeRozan insisted that the locker room never lost faith in Donovan. It was nothing more than the outside noise being overreactionary.
“I’ve played for Dwane Casey, he was coach of the year,” DeRozan said. “I played for Gregg Popovich, arguably one of the greatest coaches of all time, and playing for Billy, my personal opinion, he’s up there with those two guys just from the respect, the effort that you get from him. Even more so, he’s a guy you want to go out there and gain success, not just for yourself but for him, as well.
“The love and respect that I have for Billy is right up there with what I had with the other two guys I mentioned. I’ve been lucky my entire career to have coaches like these guys. I tell a lot of the young players that you don’t really know what you have. To have such a great personable coach, hard-working coach in Billy, don’t ever take that for granted because it’s not always greener on the other side.”
That’s just one of the lessons DeRozan wants the younger players on the roster to learn. The other more immediate one? Never let the Butler do it — an opinion shared teamwide after Butler got the walk-off.
“We’ve got to be able to run and go trap him,” Donovan said of that final play at the buzzer. “[Butler] obviously got to his spot late. We can certainly learn something from that.”
“In that moment, we should have probably sent someone over [for the double-team],” center Nikola Vucevic said. “There was a lot of stuff we could have done to help us win this game.”
