Losing six times in eight games didn't turn the Bulls against their coach and kill the season. But one win over the defending champion San Antonio Spurs, no matter how convincing, didn't solve what's been ailing them either.
The person who sounded the alert in the first place, Derrick Rose, was also the one who offered some perspective in the immediate wake of the Bulls' 23-point win.
"We needed to see if we could play with that edge, and at halftime, we needed to see if we could do it again," Rose said. "... Now we've got to see how long it can last."
Only time and a bigger sample size will tell, beginning in Dallas on Friday night, whether the six-in-eight losing stretch was just one of those funks, like an NBA virus that plagues even the best teams at some point, or whether it exposed something that's cause for greater concern.
The bet is that the Bulls have the intellect and sense of purpose to overcome the basketball stuff, starting with the defensive deficiencies (relative to recent seasons) that have to be navigated and an offense that the players believe is too slow and predictable for today's NBA. Tom Thibodeau isn't just a good coach; his defenses have been masterful, and his players, as Rose pointed out Thursday night, are as prepared as any in the league.
The reason there was so much noise nationally over the recent funk, besides Rose calling attention to it with his criticism, was that it was so uncharacteristic of the Bulls, which is a testament to Thibs and the consistently impressive play he inspires. Remember, while the Bulls had lost six in eight, they hadn't dropped three straight.
But there is one inescapable issue: the team's health. And we're not just talking about the temporary absences of Joakim Noah and Mike Dunleavy. Both will be back, Dunleavy probably by Sunday. Noah should probably be held out longer because, no matter how well Pau Gasol has played in the post offensively, the Bulls are going nowhere in the postseason if Rose and Noah aren't healthy.
Of bigger concern is the direction the league is moving on the issue of health and whether the Bulls are evolving similarly. The influence of the Spurs, specifically coach Gregg Popovich, has led the NBA to an entirely new approach with minutes and games played.
Popovich, and the growing number of his former lieutenants who have been hired around the league, are practicing something that can best be described as preventive maintenance. The Hawks' Mike Budenholzer, who worked with the Spurs for 18 years, may not sit his best players all at once, as Popovich is more than willing to do with his older stars. But Budenholzer, who will sit players who could play, said recently, "I think every team is ... prioritizing players' health."
LeBron James recently took himself out of the lineup for two weeks while acknowledging that he could have played. The reaction of generations of former NBA players is to either scoff at the notion of preventive maintenance or rail against it. And Thibs is much closer to subscribing to that old-school philosophy than this new Spurs-influenced evolution that is sweeping the NBA.
The problem? The Bulls players see their peers on opposing teams sitting to avoid injuries that they are expected to play through. Preventive maintenance anticipates wear and tear and injury. Thibs still believes in a hundred years of basketball tradition where coaches react to injury. The difference is huge, and the question is how the team will handle it.
A concession was John Paxson and Gar Forman putting Rose and Noah on a minutes limit. But that's not the same as sitting them altogether in an attempt to avoid trouble down the line.
The Bulls players, naturally, want to be part of this new-school way of keeping them healthy. Thibs? Not so much. The fact that Pop, whom Thibs adores, was as old-school as any coach in the NBA but now leads this health revolution leads the Bulls to wonder if their coach might join it.
There's precedent for this kind of radical change in professional sports, and it's not particularly hard to find. Pitching staffs for more than a century of baseball were tied to four-man starting rotations. Now, because of health concerns, five-man rotations are used. Similarly, this is the way professional basketball is going with minutes played and games played.
A very smart former Bears player uses a football analogy to suggest how the Bulls ought to resolve this. He likens Thibs to Tom Coughlin, the Giants' two-time Super Bowl-winning coach whose old-school ways supposedly were going to stand in the way of New York winning a championship. It took a smart, veteran star player in Michael Strahan going to Coughlin and saying, essentially, "We love you, but you've got to ease up just a little bit," for the Giants to find that balance between what the coach wanted and what the players needed before that team found its stride.
The Bulls should want to keep Thibs' signature toughness, but they cannot under any circumstances drag into the playoffs like dead men walking, which is what they did last season. Their toughness is a tangible asset, but their inability to keep players on the floor and the lack of energy that results is an absolute detriment.
With the Bulls, it's only Rose and Noah who have the status to do what Strahan did. Or perhaps the entire team can do it and essentially say, "We're giving you everything. We're older. We're accountable. You can trust us. You've got to ease up here and there."
Is this an issue now? Yes. Jimmy Butler, who leads the NBA in minutes played, is already showing signs of fatigue as he tries to defend high-octane wing players every night and carry the scoring load as Rose works his way back.
While neither Thibs nor Butler would ever acknowledge such fatigue, opposing players say privately that Butler isn't the physical force he was just a month ago. One of the reasons the Bulls became the popular pick as the team to win the Eastern Conference was Butler's emergence as a two-way force, so his maintenance has become nearly as important as that of Rose, Noah and now All-Star starter Gasol.
None of this is beyond solving, which is why losing six out of eight wasn't a catastrophe. There's not a team in the league that doesn't have its own issues, and half a season is plenty of time to figure them out. Too much is at stake, and the Bulls have too much intellectual capital, from the front office to the coach's office, to not figure it out and get things right by the end of March.
Even short-handed, we were reminded against the Spurs how good the Bulls can be when Rose is attacking and breaking down defenses, how efficiently Gasol can score and prolifically he can rebound, how Butler can hold his own against just about anybody, and how effective Taj Gibson and Aaron Brooks can be in support roles.
But being mentally and emotionally engaged, or "having that edge, playing mad," as Rose put it, depends in large part on being physically fresh enough to do it. Defense, more than any element of the game, is about physical commitment and effort. And defense has not just been the Bulls' strength, but their very identity.
Whether the Bulls can recapture that effort on a consistent basis over an extended period of time is yet to be seen. Thibs and his players have it in them to do so, but it's going to require the kind of compromise and commitment that defines serious contenders and exposes pretenders.