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“From a personal standpoint, it feels good just to have the reassurance from teammates and from the staff, like, ‘Hey, don’t panic, dude, you’re OK,’ ” Wisdom told the Tribune after the game. “So I’m super thankful for them because they’ve really helped me stay on course.”
In comparison, only three players from the 2020-21 Bulls roster returned this season. The secondary lineup relies on three players who are 22 or younger — Ayo Dosunmu, Williams and White. The Bulls start three All-Stars, but this is LaVine’s first postseason and the second for Nikola Vučević. Thompson and DeMar DeRozan are the most experienced Bulls players in the playoffs, playing in more than 140 postseason games combined.
“He’s getting better, but there’s still some discomfort when he makes certain moves,” La Russa said before Saturday’s game. “He’s going to have to be able to go full-bore with the swings, workouts and running before you can realistically say, hey, how about X days from now. As long as he’s got discomfort, (I’m) not even thinking about it.”
“He said, ‘Yep, he’ll play his 10th and then we’ll make a decision after,’” King said Friday after practice. “I don’t know what makes sense nowadays. They want to give him a look and give him so many games. … If it burns a year, it burns a year. If they’re OK with that, that’s fine.
“DeRozan wanted to play for the Lakers,” Johnson recently said on ESPN’s “Get Up.” “And when I got the call from his agent, I called the Lakers, said, ‘Hey, he wants to come home.’ And DeRozan could have been a Laker instead of a Bull. We could have made that deal, but when Russell and LeBron and them started talking, that’s when they nixed that deal and went with Westbrook, and he became a Laker instead of DeRozan.”
“Do we need to overemphasize failure? No,” Moskos said. “I like to reinforce the positive side of things because this game’s hard and you play it every day. And for a guy like him, he’s going to have to be available every day, so if we’re constantly harping on the negative, yesterday can bleed into today and can bleed into tomorrow, and we don’t want that either.”
“I didn’t choose this, obviously, to be African American, but I am, and it’s nice to take action,” Heyward said. “There are a lot of things we can talk about, a lot of questions we can ask, questions we can answer in conversation, but just to be a part of a group that is doing things physically in Chicago and elsewhere, it’s nice to be recognized for that.
Regardless of how LaVine’s knee feels, the Bulls know what they need from him. For four years, the guard was a sole bright on the roster, pouring himself into last-ditch efforts to get the team into the win column. Even after DeRozan arrived in Chicago last offseason, LaVine represents the backbone of a rebuild that took years to grow fruit — and is still far from complete.
Buxton, 28, has been among the game’s best players in recent years when healthy — and unfortunately for the Twins, that rarely has been the case. He hit .306 with 19 home runs in 61 games in 2021 but was limited by a broken hand and a right hip strain.
“‘That comes from all the hours in spring training and communication on where we’re going to be,” Harrison said. “Even days that we weren’t playing, having those groundball days where we’re working on being in the shift, being up the middle, flips, knowing where he’s going to be, knowing where I’m going to be. That’s where it showed.”