ORLANDO, Fla. — Something needs to change for the Chicago Bulls.
It’s clear wherever you look: their 22-26 record, their haphazard second-half implosions, their 11th spot in the Eastern Conference standings.
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But if the Bulls are going to make a change, it’s unlikely to come from the outside, even as the trade deadline draws closer. The Bulls front office has not indicated any intention of blowing up the roster ahead of the Feb. 9 deadline. In fact, the Bulls have been relatively quiet in trade rumors.
Coach Billy Donovan said he hasn’t requested major trades from executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas and the rest of the front office. After the Bulls’ 111-96 road loss to the Charlotte Hornets on Thursday, Donovan reiterated his confidence that the current group still can improve enough to merit keeping the roster intact.
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“The character in the group and the chemistry and them as people — it’s in there,” Donovan said. “We’ve got to find ways as coaches and players and all of us to try to pull that out of each other. But I’m not at a point to say, ‘OK, this just can’t work.’ ”
A little more than halfway through the season, time is running out for the Bulls to find that answer. They are fifth-to-last in the East and rank in the bottom 10 in the league in vital statistics such as 3-point shooting and rebounding. Their defensive rating has tumbled from fourth to 12th in a matter of weeks.
But veteran forward DeMar DeRozan emphasized the importance of internal improvements rather than acquisitions to reverse the team’s pattern of losing to lower-ranked opponents.
“I don’t look at it like we need this and that,” DeRozan said. “I just try to figure out every single game, every single day, how we can be better. With what we got, I never think about no trade deadline or anything like that. I just try to go out there and compete every time we play.”
On this date last year, the Bulls were second in the Eastern Conference at 30-17. Matters would quickly unravel in the wake of injuries, but the Bulls seemed to have struck a winning formula.
This season’s roster hardly changed besides the additions of Andre Drummond and Goran Dragić, who have been improvements over former bench players such as Tristan Thompson.
Why are the results so different? Donovan feels that part of it could be a regression to the mean.
“Last year we probably struck lightning in a bottle a little bit,” he said. “That season could have looked a whole lot different if DeMar had not been so miraculous in a lot of different ways.”
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This group always had inherent flaws — lackluster rim protection, a dearth of 3-point shooting. The Bulls noted the weak points yet did little to address them in the offseason while the rest of the East recalibrated and reloaded.
Maybe the front office thought the lightning Donovan described would keep striking. Maybe the Bulls believed a Lonzo Ball reappearance would set things right. Whatever the cause, the Bulls seem set to repeat their inaction next month as losses pile up.
If that’s the case, the current roster will require a major overhaul to reverse yet another skid — a belief the veterans repeated after Thursday’s loss.
“I think we definitely have enough here,” center Nikola Vučević said. “We just have to find it within ourselves. We have the talent. We’ve shown that we can do it. It’s just we’re not doing it consistently. So it’s not a question of talent, it’s just a question of us figuring out how to do 48 minutes and doing it consistently. …
“It’s on us to figure it out, and we can’t look for it anywhere outside of here or anything else. The answers are within ourselves and we have to find it.”
