Bulls lose to Clippers but still like their direction

LOS ANGELES — DeMar DeRozan has been in must-win mode for over a month now.

Even with the 124-112 loss to the Clippers on Monday, he finally has some willing participants joining him.

And now DeRozan hopes there’s a next phase to come from this: That come play-in or playoff time — wherever the Bulls (36-39) finish — iron will have sharpened iron, making a squad that was all but left for dead at the end of February a very tough out in April.

“For sure,” DeRozan said. “You’ve got to get it going, you’ve got to be locked in with everything that comes with it. These [remaining] games are going to be a testament to that. Nobody is laying down. We’re out there fighting, so it could be an indicator of what the play-in game is going to be like for us.”

DeRozan is from the school of using the regular season to build habits. Because the Bulls had so many bad ones in the first half of the season, once the trade deadline came and went quietly, the players basically entered must-win mode.

It wasn’t until Patrick Beverley joined the team that talk became action. In 16 games with Beverley, the Bulls are 10-6. In DeRozan’s mind, all 16 of those games were playoff games, as are the final seven regular-season games.

Call the loss to the Clippers an off night. The Bulls ran into a buzzsaw that shot 20-for-40 from three-point range and had 41 assists. When Nicolas Batum wasn’t bombing from long range — he finished 8-for-10 from three — Eric Gordon was doing damage, going 5-for-9.

“We didn’t bring no rhythm whatsoever,” DeRozan said. “They were hot, stayed hot. We didn’t give ourselves a chance to get back into the game. We were a step slow at everything. We didn’t make guys put the ball on the floor. They got into a rhythm and started knocking ’em in.”

DeRozan said the Bulls must erase the loss and quickly rediscover their rhythm for the game Wednesday against the Lakers at the United Center.

“We keep playing like [we have], I think we’re going to be OK,” Zach LaVine said. “Just try and stay where we are and play through adversity.”

That’s easier said than done. After the rematch with LeBron James & Co., the Bulls have three straight tough games against Memphis, Atlanta and Milwaukee.

If they finish in the No. 9 or 10 spot for the play-in, they’ll have to win two games to get into the playoffs. That’s force-feeding a lot of adversity into a team that just figured out how to start chewing it.

Coach Billy Donovan hopes this group has a better idea of what to expect, and more importantly how to handle it.

“We were a team last year coming out of the break tied for first or right there at second in the East, and obviously our defense and different things we really struggled, clearly against better teams last year,” Donovan said. “I think that was a focus coming in [this season].

“I do think the adversity we had to go through, crumbling quite honestly in games where we had big leads and just haven’t been able to stop the bleeding, I’m just seeing more fightback in those situations. The more we can adopt that mentality, that personality, if we’re fortunate to get into that [play-in] in two weeks, the experience these guys have gone through should help.”

The Bulls also have been playing the best of the four teams currently in the play-in, the others being Miami, Atlanta and Toronto.

They’ll need to keep that up with what awaits them.

“You get into those kinds of games, it gets locked up in the half-court, there are some runs, things might not go your way, and you’ve got to have a resolve and toughness mentally and physically that you’re able to play through,” Donovan said. “I’ve seen us grow in that area. I would have liked to see it happen a little bit sooner in some ways, but every team goes through their own duration of how they try and figure things out, and I think they’ve gotten better at that.”