Markkanen injury leaves a large void
Bulls plan to fill scoring hole for the next 4-6 weeks is to play faster
CLEVELAND — One way the Bulls plan to counteract the loss of forward Lauri Markkanen, who will miss four to six weeks with a stress reaction in his right pelvis is to start playing faster.
The Bulls have played at about a league average pace this season. Entering Saturday’s game against the Cavaliers, their pace was 100.6 points per 100 possessions, good for 14th in the NBA.
To make up for the scoring void left by Markkanen’s absence, however, coach Jim Boylen wants his team to start picking up the pace.
“We need to play faster,” Boylen said before Saturday’s game. “We’ve got to play faster. We’ve got to use our speed. We’ve got to make people play in front of us.”
The Bulls’ first game without Markkanen, however, was a disaster offensively.
They never found an offensive rhythm Friday during a 17-point home loss to the Kings, who had dropped six in a row.
Even though Boylen lamented more than a few scoring opportunities and open shots he believed they could have converted, the Bulls were stagnant for long stretches of the game and were held to 81 points.
With the Bulls lacking another reliable scoring option on the floor, the Kings focused all their attention on guard Zach LaVine, swarming him every time he touched the ball. It’s an adjustment LaVine made quickly by the start of the next game, scoring 27 points in the first half against the Cavs, but it’s an issue the Bulls are going to have to manage for the near future.
“(The Kings) had 4½ guys with a foot in the paint the whole game,” Boylen said. “That’s what people are going to do to us, they’re going to shrink the floor. We’ve got to play faster. We got to move the ball. I thought we had a couple possessions the ball stuck; the ball can’t stick. We’ve got to move it, we’ve got to drive it.”
To lessen the impact of playing without their top four frontcourt players — Markkanen, Otto Porter Jr., Wendell Carter Jr. and Daniel Gafford — the Bulls will be forced to use smaller lineups more frequently, which should help them push the pace.
It’s a different approach from last season when Boylen wanted to slow his shorthanded team down and get back to the basics. This team is missing the kind of big men who can make that style work.
“Obviously my style of play is completely different (than Markkanen’s),” said forward Thaddeus Young, who has replaced Markkanen in the starting lineup. “I can post up and put my back to the basket. I make some shots. I’m not as good a shooter as Lauri, but I try to insert myself in those positions that help our offense be successful against teams how he was playing.”
But finding a second scoring option has been an issue all season for the Bulls, even with Markkanen healthy.
So his absence will force the Bulls to get creative to find ways to score, even if it means disrupting their rotation.
Behind Young, Boylen has gone to Chandler Hutchison as backup power forward while inserting Denzel Valentine and Shaquille Harrison into the rotation in hopes of finding a scoring spark.
“It’s going to be more fluid, I think, just by necessity,” Boylen said. “Valentine comes in, gets it going a little bit, he plays longer. Coby’s (White) got it going, we extend his minutes, which we’ve done. Yeah, we’ll make that feel and we’ll get a read on it as it goes.”