BOSTON — Caleb Wilson bounded into the paint with the lack of abandon every rookie possesses, stretching his arms toward the rim in a desperate reach for the ball.
Less than seven minutes into Friday’s 125-111 loss to the Boston Celtics, the Bulls already were flirting with a double-digit deficit. Wilson knew the Bulls needed a spark. An offensive rebound — and an ensuing whistle in response to a reach-in by Payton Pritchard — answered that call.
Friday’s loss illustrated the power of fervent, constant rebounding to sway the momentum of a game. The Bulls dug too deep of a deficit in the first quarter to overcome, but their insistence on pursuing second-chance opportunities buoyed an outmatched roster to win the second half, accounting for 25 of the team’s point total.
Rebounding is supposed to be a key strand of this team’s DNA
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. Coach Tiago Splitter set an expectation in preseason for players to shoulder a hefty responsibility for their individual rebounding. And on paper, it might seem as if this young team is answering that call. The Bulls entered Saturday ranked 10th in the league in total rebounds at 45.8 per game. They’re averaging 3.8 more offensive boards through six games than they did last season.But in reality, the Bulls are still battling to keep bigger and better teams off their backs when the ball goes up. Their high volume of rebounds mostly reflects the fast pace of their playing style, which creates more possessions. In reality, the Bulls sit in the bottom third of the NBA in rebounding percentages — and most concerningly only pull in 65.6% of their defensive rebounds.
Those numbers account only six games, which is far too small of a sample size to make any definitive conclusion. But the Bulls aren’t trending toward the expectations Splitter set.
“We’re a young team,” Splitter said. “We’re coaching them, but there’s a lot of things that we got to get better. But we try to focus on the most important things, the things that we believe we can take an advantage (in). We are better at it, but there’s still room for improvement.”
Tobe Awaka is the only player who has earned Splitter’s complete approval, earning every minute he’s given on the court through tireless effort to claim any and all rebounds during his rotations. Splitter also has been encouraged by the efforts of wings Leonard Miller and Wilson, who can use their size and positioning to leverage a higher percentage of rebounds.
The main players who still are struggling, it appears, are the guards. For instance, Josh Giddey’s rebounding numbers have taken a noticeable dip. The 6-foot-10 guard has been a prolific rebounder for most of his career, which supplements his high volume of triple-doubles. But he isn’t getting to the boards as often this season, averaging three fewer rebounds per game than last year.
This is partially due to Giddey playing 5.8 fewer minutes per game in Splitter’s system, which utilizes a deep rotation to support a breakneck pace. But even adjusted to rebounds per 36 minutes, Giddey is averaging two fewer rebounds.
“It sounds so simple but it’s not as simple as it looks,” Giddey said. “If we look at the analytics of it, we’re just not going as much as we should be — and myself included in that. We’ve got to do a better job, everyone committing to crashing. … It just kills a team’s spirit when you consistently offensive rebound and we’ve got to look at it that way and try to get better at it.”
Players and coaches emphasize the simplicity of rebounding as a concept. But one wrinkle that has challenged Giddey is the expectation of boxing out that Splitter has placed upon backcourt players.
In many systems, offensive rebounds are predicated on an expectation that the center — or comparable big man — will box out while the rest of the wings crash and the point guard leaks back. But Splitter wants every Bulls player to find a body every time a shot goes up. That’s not how Giddey is used to pursuing rebounds — and it has thrown him off his rhythm.
“I’ve always been a guy that has tried to just hunt the ball down off of our misses, so I’m just adjusting to a different rebounding scheme,” Giddey said. “Before I’ve always been a guy to just go and hunt it.”
These box-out assignments present a new habit for the Bulls to learn — and a notable change for guards, who are often asked to box out at a significantly lower rate than frontcourt players. But veteran guards such as Norman Powell don’t want to couch their inefficiency on the boards in any excuses about a new scheme.
The Bulls have learned the hard way how a ceded offensive rebound can suck the life out of an outmatched team.
“We just got to sight-check,” Powell said. “A lot of it is ball-watching to see if the ball is going to go in or not. And as you’re doing that, those guys are crashing out the corner. The first thing is sight-check, see where your guy’s at. Is he crashing? Now you get a body. Now you track the ball down. What all of us are doing is a lot of ball-watching when a shot is going up rather than finding a body, hitting it and then going to pursue the ball.”
This is also not a problem that will be quickly fixed by the return of starting center Nic Claxton, who has not played this season after suffering a hamstring injury in the preseason. Claxton is a notable rim protector, but he is not a high-efficiency rebounder and averaged only 6.9 boards for the Brooklyn Nets last season. The center does not pose a massive presence in the paint and did not box out consistently for the Nets, which means he likely won’t translate to the Bulls system immediately.
That could be a source of frustration for the Bulls, who want to fix their rebounding as soon as possible. They understand the need for patience in many other areas — shooting, playmaking, defense by rookies — as they work through a rebuild. But that patience does not extend to effort-based habits like crashing the boards.
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“The timeline needs to be next game,” Powell said. “It’s not something like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to figure out how to rebound.’ That’s just effort. Effort and attention to detail and competitiveness. The little things that we can control, that is right now. The X’s and O’s of execution offensively, that takes time. But effort, that’s something that happens immediately.”