Chicago Bulls get their 1st win since the trade deadline, beating the Brooklyn Nets 115-107 to snap a 6-game skid

The Chicago Bulls finally got their first win since the trade deadline, a 115-107 victory over the Brooklyn Nets that snapped a six-game losing streak Sunday afternoon at the United Center.

The Eastern Conference-leading Nets were playing without Kevin Durant and James Harden, but the new-look Bulls looked more comfortable together than they had in any game since the March 25 trade deadline.

Nikola Vucevic recorded a double-double in the first half and finished with 22 points and 13 rebounds in one of his best games as a Bull, complementing a game-high 25 points from Zach LaVine. Tomas Satoransky added his best performance of the season with 19 points and 11 assists, both season highs.

Coming off the trade deadline, the Bulls were thrown right into the fire. They faced a gauntlet of Western Conference playoff teams while integrating a new one-third of their roster with their backcourt in flux. LaVine played through an ankle injury, and a neck injury cost Coby White two games before he missed Sunday’s game while in the NBA’s COVID-19 protocol.

It resulted in a season-worst skid as the team figured out how to play together on the fly while mixing and matching rotations.

“From an identity standpoint, it’s changed quite a bit for us,” coach Billy Donovan said before Sunday’s game. “And it needs to change. You have to play to your personnel, and maybe some of the things we were doing with the previous personnel, to me, didn’t quite fit with this group. So you’re trying now, not to change everything, but you’ve got to put some things in and change some things to take advantage of those guys’ skill sets.

“The one thing that I thought was good about the schedule to start with was we played against really good teams. We’re playing against all these teams that are currently in the playoffs, and you find out more about the things you have to do as a team to get better, to really improve.”

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