There will be a conversation at some point.
Maybe it will be when Bulls guard Zach LaVine starts scrimmaging in his rehab process, or maybe coach Billy Donovan will sit down with him right before he’s about to return from his injured right foot to start playing in games.
All Donovan would say Saturday was that the talk hadn’t taken place yet.
‘‘I have not talked to him about that,’’ Donovan said when he was asked whether he had spoken with LaVine about his reassimilation into the Bulls’ lineup. ‘‘I think the main focus and priority has been just his health and him getting back.’’
While the Bulls’ 109-95 loss to the Cavaliers was a minor setback, especially considering the Cavs were missing guards Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland and forward Evan Mobley because of injuries, the Bulls (13-18) still are 8-4 since LaVine’s injury.
In the bigger picture, since LaVine, center Nikola Vucevic and forward DeMar DeRozan came together for the start of the 2021-22 season, the Bulls are 19-14 (.576) when LaVine doesn’t play. To put that in perspective, that winning percentage would put them in sixth place in the Eastern Conference this season. Instead, the loss to the Cavs had them in 10th.
‘‘I think the one thing [LaVine] does provide is obviously an elite offensive player to the rim and obviously shooting the basketball,’’ Donovan said. ‘‘I’ve said this all along: We need him shooting the ball when he’s open. That’s good for our team. And when there’s hard close-outs, him attacking the paint. I think he’s more than capable of doing those things, and I think that just adds another offensive player out there.’’
Maybe LaVine would have helped against the Cavs. The Bulls’ red-hot three-point shooting hit a wall, finishing 8-for-35 (22.9%), and scoring overall was hard to come by. DeRozan led the Bulls with 21 points.
What LaVine couldn’t have fixed were the second-chance points the Bulls allowed. The Cavs outscored them a whopping 30-4 in that department, thanks to 15 offensive rebounds.
‘‘I felt like we were a step slow, quite honestly,’’ Donovan said of the rebounding issues. ‘‘That certainly was a factor. The amount of times they got it back, got fouled, it just kind of slowed us down quite a bit. Even on some rotations, we were a step slow.’’
DeRozan called it a bad night at the office.
‘‘They’re big,’’ DeRozan said of the Cavs. ‘‘They took advantage of that. That kind of hurt us. I hate to say it, but it was just one of those games where I felt like we had the right intent in our mind, but we just weren’t coming out with where the output needed to be.’’
It didn’t help that former DePaul star Max Strus, who played in two games for the Bulls in 2019-20, again came back to haunt them, making five three-pointers and scoring 26 points.
Next up for the Bulls will be a two-day Christmas break. But on the horizon as early as next week might be LaVine being cleared for contact in practices. That’s when things might get very interesting.
‘‘The biggest thing I’m concerned about, quite honestly, with [LaVine] coming back is, how does he find his rhythm back?’’ Donovan said. ‘‘I think when you miss the number of games that he’s going to miss, it always kind of takes you a little time to get your footing back under you.
‘‘But how we’ve tried to play identity-wise has not necessarily changed since he’s been out. It’s not like he went out and we went in and totally revamped the playbook. We’ve just game after game emphasized the things that we’ve felt are important.’’
