Bulls are searching for answers during mistake-filled seven-game losing skid

CHICAGO — The Chicago Bulls’ proverbial pointing finger seems close to running out of directions.

Their blemishes, abundant amid an NBA-leading seven-game skid, are appearing in too many ways to track. The defense is hemorrhaging with an often listless perimeter and a grounded 35-year-old starting center. The offense is abandoning a once quick and unselfish system — a strenuous task even with the full extent of their roster — for increased isolation and dysfunction.

There are blanket concerns, like the long-discussed need to impose physicality. Granular concerns, like their shot selection (coach Billy Donovan wishes for cleaner shots at the rim, and for non-paint 2s to evaporate entirely). Or this week’s most pertinent issue: an injury report long enough to scroll.

Inside the Bulls’ locker room Sunday, after a 123-91 loss to the Golden State Warriors, they unironically discussed love and basketball. Perhaps the last thing left to point toward.

“I think the group gets along very well,” Donovan said. “They all like each other. But until they love each other enough to block out, dive on the floor and do that not for themselves but for the guy next to them … this will continue.”

“I don’t care (about the injuries),” Donovan later added. “It’s part of the NBA. … What can we control? The disconnect is, when they care enough about each other in that locker room, that’s when it’ll get done.”

Donovan wouldn’t blame Sunday’s defeat on a lack of energy. His team’s baked-in formula for success, as constructed, requires playing on a string. Moving as a unit. Covering each other’s mistakes. Becoming greater than the sum of the parts. Boasting an on-court identity that should, in theory, conjure magic from mid.

Chicago (9-14) rattled off early wins with a fast-paced offense fueled by ball movement and bench scoring. For these Bulls to sustain their desired level of competitiveness, they require unselfishness. Perhaps an unsustainable brand of it.

Donovan senses that his team continues to lose because of the details. The thorough understanding of personnel. His Bulls entered the night aware of Golden State’s 3-point diet and the increasingly likely long rebounds to follow. Equipped with the knowledge that 50-50 balls especially mattered, even against a Warriors team missing Stephen Curry and Draymond Green.

The Bulls lost on the glass, 51-38, to a defiantly undersized team (11-6 in the first quarter). Golden State beat Chicago to distant rebounds and loose balls, finishing with 23 second-chance points and making 22 of its 47 3-pointers.

“The memo on us is out,” guard Josh Giddey said. “Crash the boards, get back in transition, and that’s how you stop the Bulls.”

Warriors guard Pat Spencer, who has the kind of tenacity Donovan would kill to roster at the moment, outplayed much of Chicago’s backcourt. He totaled 12 points, five boards, six assists and finished as a plus-30 (Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu combined to score 16 on 4-of-16 shooting).

Donovan wished his team fought to box out and rotate for one another, as opposed to a looming focus on what he called “individual stuff.” He hoped for displays of plays that represent, as he dramatically put it, “an enormous amount of respect for the man sitting next to you.”

He’s rambled for weeks about the defense, which forfeited its 17th game of 120 points to an opponent. He’s rambled about the offense, which returned guard Ayo Dosunmu Sunday, to create less on-ball pressure for Giddey. The 91 points on Sunday were a season low, while Chicago also shot a season-worst 36 percent from the field and made just 11 of its 40 3-point attempts (27.5 percent).

He’s rationalized injuries, too, though not for long.

‘‘Listen, (the Warriors have) had guys out, too, just like we have,’’ Donovan said. ‘‘Certainly, we’ve had guys in different roles, maybe different minutes — different starting lineups, so to speak. But you want your identity to permeate through your team, regardless of who’s playing.’’

At the core of Donovan’s message to the team was what he feels remains in Chicago’s control: the care and attention to detail necessary to cover each other’s mistakes on a team with structural shortcomings. Twenty-three games into the season, there are too many to let fester.

“It’s hard to say,” center Nikola Vučević said. “Maybe (we) didn’t focus enough on the details because of the kind of situation we’re in, losing and things like that, we maybe get caught up into our own games a little bit too much and think about ourselves too much.

“Part of it is being a young team. A lot of guys that haven’t really been through a lot of these situations, a lot of these games, and don’t necessarily understand, as a young guy, what it takes in this league. That’s just normal. It’s part of the growing pains.”

Save for prized prospect Matas Buzelis, these Bulls are not exactly pardon-my-silly-mistakes young. Not products-of-tanking young. They deploy an aged, agitated center for 30 minutes each night. The list of non-Buzelis players averaging at least 10 minutes with fewer than four seasons of NBA duty is limited to Dalen Terry and Julian Phillips, neither of whom averages more than 10.6 minutes.

They entered the season with an average age of 24.60, the eighth-youngest squad in the NBA. But they are youthful with miles, well-traveled even if not well-developed, gathered together in hopes their individual treks toward their potential could coalesce into a feisty team.

Together, they’ve yet to sustain good habits.

Let Giddey, who was drafted by the Oklahoma City Thunder before the second season of their recent rebuild, tell you what it looks like. The Thunder didn’t just endure that woeful 24-win season for the lottery luck at the end of it; they were content with building respectable long-term habits. Patterns their eventual title team inherited and stands by (they’re now just the third team to begin a season 23-1).

Giddey was asked about whether the Bulls have built good habits.

“I thought we were early on,” he said. “Even when we were losing games, you’re not coming in here feeling like, damn, we just got blown out by 40. It (was) like, all right, coming down to the last two minutes, we didn’t execute. How do we clean it up?

“It’s a much different feeling (from) earlier in the year.”

The Bulls last won Nov. 21, when Vučević snapped at his younger, more gleeful counterparts following a narrow at-home escape versus the Washington Wizards. During this losing streak, four of the six teams that have beaten Chicago are younger on average.

Sunday’s best performer, Golden State’s Jimmy Butler (19 points, eight rebounds, six assists), returned with a bitter reminder for those at the United Center jaded by middling finishes. The Bulls traded him eight years ago. He’s lived many lives since, now several seasons removed from willing the Miami Heat to a pair of NBA Finals. At 36, he’s closer to playing passenger to Curry’s last ride than captaining his own ship.

But here’s a jarring view of their timelines: The Bulls won 276 games in the six seasons Butler called Chicago home; they’ve won 275 games in the eight years that’ve followed.

Donovan finds himself trying to herd a stumbling young crop. Every demand feels arduous right now. On Sunday, he called for love strong enough to gloss over this roster’s flaws. Or, at the very least, an emergence from this adversity with habits that make skids like this worth stomaching.

Something, anything to make these Bulls’ misery worthwhile.