With their play-in position secured as the No. 10 seed in the Eastern Conference, the Chicago Bulls enter the final weekend of the regular season with the goal of balancing rest and preparation.
After losing to the Milwaukee Bucks on Wednesday, the Bulls are set to travel to face the ninth seed Wednesday.
Before that single-elimination game, the Bulls will face the Mavericks in Dallas on Friday night and then play host the Detroit Pistons on Sunday.
Coach Billy Donovan said veteran stars DeMar DeRozan, Zach LaVine and Nikola Vučević likely will sit out Friday. But Donovan aims to play the entirety of the roster for at least part of Sunday’s game to get the Bulls into rhythm for the play-in tournament.
“My feeling would be that Zach, DeMar, Vooch, those guys who have logged a lot of minutes would sit down with medical to determine the game against Dallas,” Donovan said.
“My feeling is they have to play some against Detroit, unless someone’s got an illness or an injury or it’s just not good physically. To take two games off when they’ve been so used to playing every other day — I think that rhythm is important.”
Rest games could help secondary-rotation players such as Patrick Williams, Ayo Dosunmu and Coby White, who could benefit from more minutes. And for DeRozan — who has been struggling with a strain in his right hip and thigh since mid-December — taking a night off could allow for recovery that the grind of the regular season rarely affords.
But too much rest ahead of a must-win game also could become a burden if players grow rusty and out of sync with one another.
“It’s always a tricky thing because you always want to find and keep a rhythm,” DeRozan said. “With that, you don’t want to feel like you’ve had too much rest, especially going into a one-game elimination. I never try to think past tomorrow. I just try to take tonight and see how I feel tomorrow. We got to have a rhythm, individually and team-wise. So we’ll figure it out over the next couple days.”
Rest also could be key for guard Alex Caruso, who has played through a sprain on the top of his left foot for three weeks. Caruso did not play Wednesday in the second game of a back-to-back and has missed five of the last 13 games. Donovan said the main issue for Caruso is a buildup of pain when he’s forced to play too many minutes over a short time.
The Bulls knew Caruso would be dealing with this injury for the rest of the season, and the guard is known for his high pain tolerance and willingness to grit through injuries. But the injury has affected Caruso’s mobility, forcing Donovan to pull him out of a March 18 game against the Miami Heat after the guard wasn’t moving right.
“He’s got a high pain threshold — that’s really, really not the issue,” Donovan said. “It’s how well he can move and plant and cut with the pain. When he can’t do the things that he’s typically been able to do at the level he does it, he knows that he can’t be as productive. He wants to be as productive as he can and he doesn’t want to be a liability. When he gets to a place, you can just tell. You know where he’s at.”
A few extra days of rest won’t fully heal Caruso’s injury, but they could provide enough time for the guard to enter the play-in game closer to his typical agility.
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