Here’s ESPN Chicago reporting on the Bulls, who have been playing without center Joakim Noah lately, but still expect to perform a bit better than they have in recent games:
Lost amid Derrick Rose’s frustrated words after Monday night’s latest poor performance against the Cleveland Cavaliers was the fact Taj Gibson may have spoken the most telling words of the entire night.
Gibson doesn’t have the same clout that Rose does, but he is a six-year veteran who gives some of the most honest assessments in basketball. The power forward has been around for the entirety of Tom Thibodeau’s five-year tenure with the Bulls, a fact that made his comments so telling in the wake of one of the worst stretches in the Thibodeau era.
“We got to practice harder,” Gibson said. “We can’t be taking days off. We’re going to go through rough stretches, but we got to practice harder and we got to play with some energy.”
A Thibodeau-coached team playing without energy and not working hard seems incomprehensible given the success that he and his team have enjoyed over his tenure. After all, hard work has defined Thibodeau’s head-coaching career. For four years his players played hard almost every night. They played with a type of intensity and purpose that is not common on a nightly basis in the NBA.
