Column: Benching Zach LaVine wasn’t Billy Donovan’s best decision, but the Chicago Bulls coach will have to live with it
After shooting 2-for-17 in the Chicago Bulls’ 87-80 win over the Golden State Warriors on Jan. 30, 1998, Michael Jordan shrugged it off.
“It was a bad night. A bad night on the job,” he conceded afterward. ”I just take it as that. If I could explain why it happened, I could have corrected it as the game went along. … You don’t want to have bad nights like tonight. But it happens. No excuses.”
Everything went wrong for Jordan, but the Bulls won the game in Oakland, Calif., taking the pain out of one of the worst offensive performances of his career. And by that point of the season, with the Bulls well on their way to their sixth title, everyone, including coach Phil Jackson, was willing to overlook a night when Jordan looked human.
Zach LaVine didn’t get a chance to shrug off his 1-for-14 shooting Friday in a 108-107 loss to the Orlando Magic.
After coach Billy Donovan benched him down the stretch, LaVine automatically became the story and remained so three days later before the Bulls took the court Monday night for a 121-107 victory against the Boston Celtics at the United Center.
LaVine reacted to the surprising benching like any NBA superstar would in the same situation, saying he felt he should’ve been in the lineup at crunch time. He wasn’t angry or whiny but stated his beliefs.
“I’ve got to do a better job at the beginning of the game to make my shots, but you play a guy like me down the stretch,” he said. ”That’s what I do. Do I like the decision? No. Do I have to live with it? Yeah. Be ready to put my shoes on and play the next game.”
Many Bulls fans lauded Donovan for putting the team ahead of the superstar, a refreshing change of course from NBA norms. Some pointed out it’s a coach’s job to win, after all, and if Ayo Dosunmu gave the Bulls a better chance than LaVine, it was a move any coach would make.
And had LaVine remained in the game, he probably wouldn’t have stopped shooting, in spite of his off night, which included an 0-for-5 showing in 3-point attempts. Maybe the Bulls never would’ve had a four-point lead with 20 seconds remaining if LaVine remained in the lineup and tried to make up for his shooting woes down the stretch. It’s not like he has been shooting well of late, hitting 23.5% from beyond the arc in the Bulls’ four-game losing streak.
But coaching is more than X’s and O’s, especially when you’re dealing with the best players on the planet. It’s also about keeping your players in the right frame of mind, knowing which ones need a kick in the rear with a seat on the bench and which ones need a pat on the back.
LaVine may not be Jordan, and Donovan definitely is not Jackson. But LaVine deserves the benefit of the doubt in crunch time. He’s the most electric performer the Bulls have had in a decade and deserving of the five-year, $215 million deal that some are now criticizing.
That doesn’t mean you want him taking the last shot on a night he’s not in rhythm, but LaVine should’ve been on the court with the game on the line, just for his presence alone. I can’t imagine Donovan taking out DeMar DeRozan at the end, no matter what he did the previous 44 minutes.
LaVine may have sounded a bit arrogant when he said “you play a guy like me down the stretch,” but he was stating the truth. What other NBA All-Star would be on the bench in a similar situation? The Bulls were 0-6 in “clutch” situations — a five-point margin with five or fewer minutes left — before the benching. Now they’re 0-7.
The reason superstars don’t get benched for off nights is they’ve proved over the years they can do extraordinary things. It wasn’t that long ago — Jan. 30, 2021 — that the Portland Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard hit two 3-pointers in the final 10 seconds, including one at the buzzer, to turn a five-point deficit into a 123-122 win over the Bulls at an empty United Center during the pandemic.
Great players can do that. LaVine is in that stratosphere.
LaVine has been a leader of this team for quite a while, through the dark days of the Jim Boylen rebuild to now. He doesn’t need to be motivated like a bench player seeking more playing time. It’s absurd to think the benching would spur him like it did under Boylen in 2019, when he was the only star on an awful team run by an even worse coach. LaVine will come out of this mini-slump on the strength of his talent, not because the benching.
Naturally, the two antagonists quickly let everyone know they’re cool. It was just a “one-off,” as Donovan said afterward, and surely it won’t happen again anytime soon. LaVine said Sunday he respected the coaching decision, even if he disagreed with it.
“If we won, obviously I would’ve been ecstatic,” he said. “We lost, I wasn’t. I had a terrible game. … But I’m one of the best players on the court regardless of who’s playing and I think I should be on the court in crunch time. That’s just the mentality I have.”
LaVine already was sick of talking about it, telling reporters Sunday he didn’t want the benching “to get blown out of proportion.”
Sorry, it’s too late for that. LaVine has to realize a “max” player gets “max” attention, good or bad. If Donovan had benched Patrick Williams instead, no one would have batted an eye.
The Bulls are entering a crucial stretch of games that could determine whether they’re real postseason contenders or not even a play-in team. By the time they return from their six-game trip on Dec. 7, they could be buried in the Eastern Conference.
It’s not all on LaVine’s shoulders, but it suddenly feels that way.
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