As lottery standings tighten, Bulls offer little resistance to Toronto

There is a world in which the Bulls can stick to the assignment of losing, find a few key positives, and still be aligned with the big picture.

It’s not hard.

Then again, it helps when it comes against an opposing team that is on a much different journey.

That’s what Wednesday’s 139-109 one-sided affair against Toronto was as the playoff-bound Raptors dismantled the Bulls at the United Center, second-year forward Matas Buzelis still had a 19-point night – his seventh 18-plus scoring game in the month of March – and the Bulls stayed a half-game below Milwaukee in the standings, which means a half-game better in the draft lottery.

Why are the Bulls and Bucks significant at this point of the season?

The two franchises have been exchanging paint the last week with all the position jockeying, and on Wednesday afternoon it was reported that the Bucks were trying to convince former league MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo to shut it down for the remainder of the season.

In other words, they see the Bulls (28-41) still playing try-hards and wanted to move into that No. 9 spot of the lottery.

The report said that Antetokounmpo refused, but it remained to be seen if he would stick to that. Milwaukee has the easier remaining schedule of the two teams, so were looking for any advantage they could to lose games.

The Bulls didn’t have to look very far against Toronto.

That was very clear from the opening tip as RJ Barrett scored 10 points in the first seven minutes to push the visiting team to an eventual 15-point lead in the opening stanza. The Raptors followed up that with a 40-point second quarter and any hopes the Bulls had of a second straight win was quickly dashed.

“There’s two things you can learn from this game,” Bulls starting big Jalen Smith said afterward. “One, you can throw it in the garbage, but two, you can also learn where was our fight?”

Not the only one to be asking that question, either.

Bulls coach Billy Donovan recalled the shootaround and film session, pointing out that he made it very clear to his team that Toronto had been playing really well lately, and their recipe was physicality, shot fakes, and using deflections to turn teams over or at least disrupt the offensive flow.

What did the coach then watch his team do right out of the gate?

“I felt like we were making some progress, we were getting better, right?” Donovan said of the compete factor. “We talked about the importance of taking care of the basketball and showed film on the importance of that.

“They had 20 points off our turnovers in the first half, six times we left our feet on shot fakes, and I think it was 12-5 in the transition battle. We’re not going to be perfect in terms of never turning the ball over, but that’s the game right there.”

And it’s not like things are about to get any easier, as playoff-bound Cleveland comes to town on Thursday for a back-to-back.

Smith was hoping that there would be a better mental check-in for it.

“We had no fight,” Smith added. “This is the third time we’ve played them and we’ve gotten punked. At the end of the day we just got to want it. We’ve got to have that fight and we have to have that grit. I honestly couldn’t tell you (why we didn’t), it’s basketball so every day isn’t going to be perfect, but we’ve got to figure out what else can we do to impact the game. It’s just a mental game right now for us.”