CHICAGO -- Lost amid Derrick Rose's frustrated words after Monday night's latest poor performance against the Cleveland Cavaliers was the fact Taj Gibson may have spoken the most telling words of the entire night.
Gibson doesn't have the same clout that Rose does, but he is a six-year veteran who gives some of the most honest assessments in basketball. The power forward has been around for the entirety of Tom Thibodeau's five-year tenure with the Bulls, a fact that made his comments so telling in the wake of one of the worst stretches in the Thibodeau era.
"We got to practice harder," Gibson said. "We can't be taking days off. We're going to go through rough stretches, but we got to practice harder and we got to play with some energy."
A Thibodeau-coached team playing without energy and not working hard seems incomprehensible given the success that he and his team have enjoyed over his tenure. After all, hard work has defined Thibodeau's head-coaching career. For four years his players played hard almost every night. They played with a type of intensity and purpose that is not common on a nightly basis in the NBA.
But why, after the Bulls rattled off 13 wins in 15 games last month, would things suddenly take such a turn for the worse? Why would a team that usually plays so hard start rolling over and not fighting back for long stretches? Why would a team defined by intensity go long stretches without showing any?
"That's a great question," Thibodeau said. "We're going to continue to look at it. [We have] a lot of moving parts, hard to build continuity. We have to find some continuity. Maybe we look at different people. I'm going to think about it, study the film, and try to come up with some answers."
One of the strangest parts about the Bulls' recent slide is that neither Thibodeau nor his players seem to have any concrete answers how to fix the problem. Over the years when tough times arose for Thibodeau or his players, they just worked harder.
"The magic is in the work," the veteran coach is fond of saying.
But that doesn't appear to be the answer these days for a Bulls squad that is feeling the red-hot spotlight that comes with championship expectations.
If the Bulls aren't working as hard as they used to and they can't seem to find the right answer to fix their problems, the natural follow up is: Are the players tuning out Thibodeau?
As frustrated as Thibodeau makes them at times, and as much of a taskmaster as he can be, there isn't the sense that he has lost his team. His players hate his guts sometimes, but they are too proud to quit on him now. Rose, Gibson and Joakim Noah have invested way too much of their professional careers in Thibodeau's system to stop playing hard in the middle of a season.
They believe they can win a title with this group and they remain confident they can turn this around once they get fully healthy. If Thibodeau's principles have taught his players anything over the past five years, it's that they can't quit when times get tough.
"It comes from within," Gibson said. "There's nothing more you can say. It's all about how much heart you have and how determined you're going to be. Like Thibs said before, we got to practice harder. We can't take days off.
"Like Thibs said, everybody's got to put a little bit more into the jar."
If Rose, Noah and Gibson lead the way, the rest of their teammates will follow. If they decide to stop playing for Thibodeau, their teammates will follow that example as well. But if the latter occurs, it would fly in the face of all the hard work the three men have put in together over the past five years, especially the strong bond that Noah and Gibson have built within the city playing without Rose the past few years.
Thibodeau is by no means above criticism, and will become the fall guy for this team if he can't get his group out of the recent funk that it is in. But he is too solid of a coach, and his players have invested too much into his program, to believe that they will continue playing as poorly as they have over the past couple of weeks.