Bulls looking to make strong closing arguments as regular season nears

Critics of Bulls coach Billy Donovan couldn’t wait to pounce.

Several of Donovan’s personnel moves in the Bulls’ season-ending play-in loss to the Heat last spring backfired and seemingly played a part in their fourth-quarter meltdown.

Those weren’t exactly the lasting impressions Donovan wanted to take into an early summer vacation.

Donovan first removed spark plug Andre Drummond with eight minutes left, then pulled Coby White for Patrick Beverley with just more than two minutes left. Neither move seemed to work, and the Bulls’ six-point lead slowly faded.

Donovan explained both decisions afterward, and neither was out of the ordinary of his substitution patterns during the regular season. And maybe that was the problem.

As good as the Bulls were in clutch games — defined as games within five points in the last five minutes — during their playoff season in 2021-22 (25-16), they went south in that category last season (15-23).

So while a lot has been made about who will be starting when the Bulls tip off the regular season Oct. 25 against the Thunder, Donovan still is trying to figure out who will be on the court at the end.

‘‘That’s equally as important, who you’re closing with, and we’ve got a number of guys that we’ve got to look at,’’ Donovan said. ‘‘Sometimes it’s matchup, sometimes personnel; it’s those kinds of things. The first week [of training camp], I think you’re trying to install who you want to be offensively and who you want to be defensively. But I do think that having times in practice where you’re actually scrimmaging those situations — whether it’s the last five minutes of the game, whether it’s defending a three with a tie score — there’s so many situations.

‘‘Certainly for us . . . we would have different guys closing in different situations.’’

Unfortunately, practices and intrasquad scrimmages are the only places to continue the experiment. In the Bulls’ first three preseason games, closing time was for the back end of the extended roster to get some work. While Donovan said he planned to play his regulars more minutes in the last two preseason games, late in-game situations likely won’t change.

That means you can expect it to remain a work in progress.

What Donovan likes is that he has options. The offseason additions of Torrey Craig and Jevon Carter give him that.

‘‘We have a lot of guys that can finish in certain situations,’’ Donovan said. ‘‘Theoretically, you’re up by five points with maybe 20 seconds to go, maybe you decide to go all defense in that situation. The last five minutes of the game, based on who the other team has out there, maybe we feel we have guys that have guarded a guy particularly well. So I do feel we have some versatility, certainly defensively, to play a number of guys closing a game.’’

What will that look like? Look for Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan to be cemented in and for Nikola Vucevic to be all but a shoo-in — unless there’s a really bad matchup or Donovan wants to close with a small group.

Alex Caruso has been used to close his share of games because of his defense, but Donovan also can go with Carter, Craig or Patrick Williams.

LaVine knows which group has caught his eye, not only in the Bulls’ double-overtime victory Thursday against the Nuggets but in scrimmages.

‘‘The main thing that I watch there is AC [Caruso], Ayo [Dosunmu] and T-Craig were on the floor, and it was steal after steal, havoc, everybody on the ground,’’ LaVine said. ‘‘You’re going to see a lot of different lineups in the preseason; that’s just normal. You might as well test it out.’’