CHICAGO — On the heels of Jaden Ivey’s loaded Thursday night postgame availability, head coach Billy Donovan rejoined the Chicago Bulls on Friday, addressing the 24-year-old’s absence in a 110-101 loss to the Raptors.
The curious case of Ivey only seemed to develop additional layers.
The sixth-year Bulls coach defended Wes Unseld Jr.’s decision to sit Ivey, noting that the staff discussed the potential outcomes for the crowded backcourt once guards Josh Giddey and Tre Jones returned. (Unseld was serving as interim head coach with Donovan away from the team following the death of his father earlier this month.) Donovan’s wiring hasn’t changed, set to make sense of whatever roster he has and shoot for wins — even with this discordant group. His staff spent the first few games with this new iteration of the team trying to bring them up to speed and swell their minutes, many of them joining from situations that didn’t require nearly as much usage.
In explaining Unseld’s decision, Donovan found himself repeatedly underscoring Ivey’s current status as a player. Donovan found different ways to say that he hasn’t seen the version of Ivey that Detroit once coveted in the early days of its rebuild, which echoed Ivey’s own sentiments Thursday.
“I’m not the same player I used to be,” Ivey said postgame.
“I think the four games leading up to this, to me, I don’t think he’s played to the level that he’s capable of playing at or has played at,” Donovan said, noting Ivey lacked speed and explosiveness.
Ivey is roughly 14 months removed from the catastrophic broken fibula that sidelined him for much of last season. In late October, Ivey also underwent a procedure on his right knee. Leading up to Thursday’s DNP, Ivey appeared in every game he’s been active for dating back to Nov. 22.
According to Donovan, Ivey wasn’t at practice Friday, instead receiving a consultation on his knee soreness. Later Friday evening, Ivey was listed as questionable for Saturday’s reunion with the Pistons with what the team called “left patellofemoral pain syndrome.”
After Unseld called the decision to sit Ivey “strictly a basketball decision,” Ivey later said that he was told his knee soreness was one of the reasons he didn’t play. But Ivey minimized that soreness, saying he felt “normal” in terms of availability, and that the soreness is something he’s “dealt with for years.” He added that it hasn’t kept him out of practice and that he was good to play Thursday.
He and Donovan seemed aligned on that front, with Donovan reaffirming that Ivey’s DNP was Unseld’s decision.
“I don’t know how much it’s affecting him,” Donovan said of Ivey’s knee. “He was definitely available to play. Nothing’s kept him out with his knee.”
Asked about Ivey taking the day to address the knee, Donovan added “I think he wanted to get it checked out. … I know he mentioned to our medical guy he was dealing with knee soreness. But it was nothing that was necessarily keeping him out, because even in Detroit, he was playing with it.”
Can Ivey return to the player he once was?
“I would imagine when all these guys go through trades, there’s a pretty extensive medical thing,” Donovan said. “So obviously the trade went through because of that. … I didn’t feel like he was moving and playing like he had in the past. And I do think that that had impacted his performance some. So what does that mean going forward? We’ll see what the doctors say when he comes back from this.
“But I wouldn’t say it’s a situation where, ‘Hey, listen, he’s just out of the rotation.’ I think as we’re looking at the group coming back after the All-Star break, we’re trying to put the guys out there that we feel are gonna contribute and help them.”
After Chicago’s trade deadline activity, which swapped Donovan’s Play-In inclined crew for the currently imbalanced roster, Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnišovas said development and youth would be prioritized in the next stage of this half-hearted rebuild. While Ivey certainly would seem to slot atop the Bulls’ list of priorities on the surface, these increased variables seem to complicate that.
“Our goal, our responsibility organizationally, is, how do we help him get back to that level of being able to (perform)?” Donovan said. “And what are the things that are maybe preventing him from doing that?”
Donovan said minutes will vary for guards because of a cramped depth chart, and that Thursday wasn’t necessarily an indicator of what the rest of the season holds for Ivey. He did, however, make clear that his decisions will be rooted in deploying lineups that both help them win and give them insight into who fits best with the tenured pieces.
Ivey, approaching free agency and reeling from injuries, finds himself in a more urgent position than his backcourt mates. He also finds himself in an incredibly deep guard room — Anfernee Simons said he’s never seen anything like it — and under a staff that doesn’t associate development with boundless playing time.
Nothing about Donovan ever screamed that he’d blindly play Chicago’s young guards like Ivey and Rob Dillingham, even if the team’s direction suggested these Bulls should be incentivized to do so. Even with these new expectations and a jumbled roster, Donovan seems prepared to make his young players earn their roles.
“Experience doesn’t mean growth,” Donovan said. “Just because a guy is gaining experience in between the lines, doesn’t mean there’s growth. You throw a guy out there, he’s just running around and playing, and you say, ‘Oh, good.’ I’ve had guys throughout my career that have had a lot of experiences and there hasn’t been great growth.
“So this idea that just because a guy’s playing is gonna grow, that doesn’t necessarily equate to anything.”