Matas Buzelis knew to expect a steep learning curve as a rookie for the Chicago Bulls.
He always knew it would be tough entering the NBA as a teenager. Weeks after making his debut, nothing has gotten easier. Opponents can still catch him off guard. He leaves his feet for shot fakes, overadjusts on switches. He drives to the basket visualizing a poster dunk only to get turned away by a solid defender.
But Buzelis doesn’t care about any of that. Those missteps are encouragement, not a deterrent. And with each game and each mistake, the rookie is building himself into a regular rotation player for the Bulls.
‘‘I just keep learning, keep striving, keep progressing,” Buzelis said. “I think it’s gotten better every time I’ve played. I keep getting more comfortable on the court.”
The disparity between Buzelis’ first-year goals and his readiness to compete on defense was apparent in Friday’s loss to the Boston Celtics.
On his first defensive rotation of the game, Buzelis miscommunicated on a pick-and-roll switch, hedging high on Jayson Tatum to give Kristaps Porziņģis a wide-open lane to the rim. On the next trip down the court, Jaylen Brown buried a 3-pointer in his face. A few plays later, Buzelis completely failed to fight through an Al Horford screen, allowing Tatum to sink another 3 unguarded.
Coach Billy Donovan pulled Buzelis after only five minutes, and he never returned to the court. It was a letdown. Buzelis wanted to prove he was ready for a bigger moment — facing the top contender in the East, fighting for advancement in the NBA Cup tournament.
Buzelis didn’t try to hide his frustration, but Donovan noted that he funneled it into focus. And it didn’t come as a surprise that his next game — a season-high 20-point performance against the Brooklyn Nets — came on the heels of his deepest disappointment.
This is a defining trait for Buzelis: He is tough to intimidate. It might be easy to chalk it up as the overconfidence of a newly turned 20-year-old — but for a rookie, this fearlessness is integral to the swiftness of his improvement.
“He’s not afraid of failure or messing up,” Donovan said. “He gets disappointed or down because he wants to do better, but it doesn’t paralyze him. I’ve seen some players who are just afraid to make mistakes and they just don’t do anything. He’s not that way.”
Donovan was insistent from the start: Buzelis wouldn’t be handed any minutes.
Developing young talent is the main focus of this season. But Donovan didn’t want the rookie to feel like minutes were guaranteed — “free candy,” as Donovan put it — without first being earned.
Some of that is about scoring. Buzelis is the most prolific dunker on the roster after Zach LaVine, but he’s still struggling to make his way to the rim with regularity. Despite a fervent focus on bulking up in the weight room, Buzelis is still a little undersized to body up against opponents in the paint. His attempts at the nifty moves that drew eyes in the G League — Eurosteps, spin moves — get knocked off their axis more often than not.
“There’s things that he’s accustomed to doing just habitually over years that he’s been able to get away with, and he can’t get away with that now,” Donovan said. “A lot of guys when they come in, they have to find an offensive game from the perspective that the game is so different from what they’ve played. Their game needs to evolve.”
As a result, Buzelis is fueling most of his scoring from long range. The rookie is shooting 36.2% from 3-point range and averaged 1.4 makes from behind the arc in the last 10 games. This accuracy allows him to make an impact on the court while still working on his playmaking and bulking up to contest more solidly at the rim.
With time, Donovan believes Buzelis will round out his shot profile. But while offense may be where Buzelis earns his place in highlight reels, defense is where the rookie will earn his minutes on the court.
The goal on defense is always simple: Don’t become a liability. That was the reality check of the Celtics game. Buzelis was a step slow at every turn, allowing opponents to slip by him and arriving a beat too late on help rotations.
Good defense, the rookie is quickly learning, is predicated on consistency. And every time Buzelis makes a mistake, he pays for it immediately.
“Guys are really physical,” Buzelis said. “You’ve got to make the right reads, the right plays every possession. It’s kind of nonstop.”
With time, the speed of defensive assignments is beginning to slow down. The 6-foot-10 Buzelis shines against smaller lineups and secondary rotations, such as in Monday’s game against the Nets. And despite some defensive growing pains, Buzelis is already the second-leading shot blocker on the Bulls behind starting center Nikola Vučević with 14.
While Buzelis’ length is an important advantage, he grounds his shot-blocking ability in timing. As a result, he has carved out a comfort zone tracking over as a help defender on rotations inside the arc, picking up the bulk of his blocks by knocking away a shot from beside or behind a teammate’s defensive assignment.
If Buzelis can build this shot-blocking savvy into a tool for his perimeter defense, Donovan believes he will begin to elevate himself as a reliable defender.
“There’s nothing that I see that he would be incapable of doing,” Donovan said. “He’s just going to have to learn.”
For Donovan, the learning has never been a concern when it comes to Buzelis. And that’s why the rookie’s minutes have continued to increase as the season progresses, logging 20 or more minutes in four of the last six games.
That trend likely will continue Thursday against the Spurs as Coby White, Lonzo Ball and Patrick Williams will not travel to San Antonio, opening up the backcourt. And regardless of Buzelis’ performance — highlights, lowlights, anything in between — Donovan’s confidence is growing in the rookie’s ability to ride the learning curve for a successful debut season.
“The internal stuff — the work ethic, the competitiveness — all that stuff I love,” Donovan said. “That’s going to be a huge driving force in him getting better.”
