LaVine has carried heavy load for short-handed Bulls and there's no end in sight
Zach LaVine found the perfect way to spend his rare day off Thursday, thanks to some thoughtfulness from his father.
"My Dad just got me this massaging chair. It was lovely," LaVine said Friday at the Advocate Center. "I sat in there for like an hour. Talked to my girlfriend on the phone. Played video games. Played with my dog. That's about it."
This season has been a grind, especially for LaVine, who has to carry a heavy load while Lauri Markkanen, Kris Dunn and Bobby Portis are all out with injuries.
As of Friday morning, LaVine was the NBA's fourth-leading scorer at 27.4 points per game and ranked sixth in minutes per game at 35.8.
The Bulls have stayed reasonably competitive under the circumstances, going 3-9 with a few narrow losses. They'll host Cleveland, which is an NBA-worst 1-10, Saturday at the United Center.
"If we go out there and execute and do everything we can to be in the game at the end and have a fighting chance, I think we did our job," LaVine said. "That's all you can ask for. It's exhausting. But this is our job. We go out here to do this, so we have to deal with it."
One issue for the Bulls is the light at the end of the tunnel is still faint. Markkanen might be back in about two weeks, Dunn and Portis are probably a month away with knee injuries, and Denzel Valentine is out indefinitely with a lingering ankle problem.
Reporters tried to ask coach Fred Hoiberg how things will change for LaVine when the reinforcements come back, but he wasn't ready to look so far into the future.
"You don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with what can happen when everybody is back, which we still don't know when that's going to be," Hoiberg said. "It's still a ways away from happening."
There has been good news for the Bulls during this opening stretch, mostly how LaVine has done a nice job of becoming a go-to scorer and rookie center Wendell Carter Jr. has shown promise. Technically, the Bulls can be thankful they've had no new injuries during the past two weeks.
But the reality is in order to win games right now, they need LaVine to be great and get help from NBA newcomers like Antonio Blakeney and Chandler Hutchison. LaVine scored a career-high 41 points in Monday's double-overtime win at New York.
"I'm doing what I have to do," LaVine said. "I don't know if I have to score 30 for us to win. I think we won one game where I didn't (27 in Atlanta on Oct. 27). I'll do whatever I've got to do to try to put points on the board or help us win. If that's scoring, facilitating, rebounding, whatever it is. It's scoring for right now. I'll continue to do that until we need something else."
The next two games on the schedule are home dates against teams with losing records, Cleveland and Dallas. But next week, the Bulls will get Boston, Milwaukee and Toronto, possibly the three best teams in the East, in a four-day span.
With the Bulls in rebuilding mode, they're going to be cautious with injuries to the young players. So they're not going to push Markkanen to come back any sooner from his sprained left elbow. The healthier players just have to deal with it.
"It's my job to keep the morale up right now and I have been pleased with the effort," Hoiberg said. "Our guys are going out there and playing extremely hard and as short-handed as we are, to still be in the games as much as we have been, it's a credit to our guys."
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