“I guess you look at our offense, how we got so much firepower,” Gibson said. “And everybody’s elevated their game, too. We had a lot of guys that were just defenders, and then defenders turned [into] kind of scorers a little bit and feeling comfortable scoring the ball now. At times we kind of loosen up on defense, and that little bit of loosening up in the game … can really open up a can of worms for the other teams that really [hit] their stride and score points on us. And that’s been the little letdowns in the games, I think.”
“It’s going to happen sometimes when you’re feeling good about yourself,” he continued. “Everybody’s telling you, ‘You’re good, you’re good, you’re good, you’re good,” throwing things basically in your lap, [and] you kind of lose track of things.”
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"As of late, we've just been getting beat," Gibson continued. "We've been getting humbled to tell you the truth. We lost to Utah; we lost to Orlando; teams are coming in really just trying to beat us. Of course, everybody's trying to beat us, but everybody's really trying to take it to the edge -- take us to the edge, basically battle us -- because they know we're one of those teams with high expectations. It's up to us to just push through this hard bump in the road. All the good teams go through it. Right now it's just our turn."
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But Gibson believes there's a more important issue at hand. He and his teammates feel the heightened expectations around this team, and he understands that other teams want to make a name for themselves against a title contender.
"Teams are looking at us as a test to see how far they can go," Gibson said. "If I was another team, I would come in looking at the Chicago Bulls trying to go after them as hard as I can, learn from it. Us, we're just thinking that we're going to beat teams sometimes."
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"You look at how we play, how we start games, and how we play sometimes, we just think we're going to beat teams just because we got Chicago across our chest," Gibson said.
"And that's basically just like a target, because these guys are coming in, giving us their all the first five minutes into the game, and then we're wondering like, 'What happened?' But we'll get it together." - Friedell
If they don't stop feeling good soon it might not matter, half the season is over already.
