Welcome into the House of L podcast. I'm Lawrence Holmes. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. I said that I was going to try and add some more bulls content to what we do on House of L, especially considering they were in first place in the Eastern Conference.

The last couple of days have been rough and as I'm recording on Friday night, things have gotten a little bit rougher. Thanks so much for hanging out here with me. Yes, I like that beat.

Shout out to my nephew Justin. He gave me a whole bunch of new beats. I paid him for it, but he gave me a whole new set of beats and I think I'm going to use this one for when we do bull stuff.

So I hope that you like it. I know that I do. Let's get into it. The bulls lose 138 to 96 and I am going on vacation like literally after I finish this, but I did want to talk about this. Talk about what happened on Friday night and that Zach Levine getting hurt. It was strange because he comes down with that rebound and then takes a foul and walks off the floor.

And then there's the issue with his knee, whereas I'm recording this, the last report that I got was from Casey Johnson and Billy Donovan saying he thinks not the Donovan, but that Zach thinks it's not serious and they're going to give him an MRI.

That's there aren't a lot of things that I don't think this bull's team can overcome injury wise unless it's a significant injury to Zach and or Demar.

Those are two guys that them missing a significant amount of time would be a death knell for the bulls and any sort of hope of you seeing them really do something big in the Eastern Conference.

Now if it's a couple of weeks, maybe even a month because you are still in January, I think that that's something that they can absorb. That's not them sitting at the top of the Eastern Conference anymore, but that is something that they can absorb, hoping that if Zach comes back, if it's not something super serious and Zach comes back, that they'll be able to then get their thing together before the playoffs start.

But it's scary and the things that were scary about Friday night's game against the Warriors was, I want to put in the human factor.

The factor of you're watching one of your better players, a top 10 score in the NBA go down and your mind wanders and you're already playing short-handed because Derek Jones Jr. is hurt.

Alex Caruso has got COVID and now Zach Levine walks off the floor and that leaves what I think is a fairly decent duo of Demar and Vouch, but now you're asking everyone to do more.

And for some reason, the bulls couldn't get out of their own way and they definitely, they did a really good job of getting out of the way of the Warriors in this game.

They scored 47 points in a half, they got outscored 41 to 19 in the second quarter, that's similar to them getting outscored in third quarter in their game against Brooklyn.

So there's some issues here and I was looking forward to seeing whether or not Billy Donovan would be able to rally them after what happened on Wednesday night and he didn't.

And so I'm kind of sitting here going, well, am I going to allow the human element or not?

And I'm going to like, I'm going to allow the human element of those guys guys shook because they didn't know exactly what was going on with Zach and as I'm recording this, I don't know exactly what's going on with Zach.

So there's a lot that needs to be digested, but I do think that one of the issues that this team has shown in the last couple of games, and if you want to count the Dallas game too, we can talk about that is the fact that they haven't been good at all at getting back in transition defense.

In this game, what I didn't like about this game against the Warriors was, I didn't like that the Warriors were trading threes for twos.

It didn't matter who came down, they were trading threes for twos at the beginning of this game and Lonzo Ball kind of did his best to have the bulls keep up with them.

In the first quarter, like he was hot and that's a great thing to see him be a more active participant in what's going on with them offensively, but the three point defense for the bulls has been poor.

Now part of that I do think is because of their issues in transition and you look at the field goal percentages of teams shooting behind the arc, Brooklyn shot with 53% and gold state shot 45% not good.

Any time that you have a team that's anywhere close to 40% from three point, you got a problem.

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