BOSTON — The X’s and O’s will come around.
Bulls veteran guard Norman Powell has been around the game long enough to know that a new team, especially a young team, has to go through some growing pains to figure that part of the game out.
That’s just the reality of life in the NBA.
But the ‘‘right-now things,’’ as Powell calls them, need to be figured out, well, right now.
Rebounding, defending and physicality are ongoing issues for the 1-3 Bulls, enough so that Powell discusses them daily with the group or individual teammates.
‘‘The timeline needs to be the next game,’’ Powell said. ‘‘It’s no, ‘Oh, we’ve got to figure out how to rebound.’ That’s just effort and attention to detail and competitiveness.
‘‘My timeline is 10 or 15 games in on how we’re going to play. But the little things, like effort and things we can control? That is a right-now thing. The X’s and O’s of execution offensively and how we’re going to play on that end, that takes time. But the effort and attention to detail, how we’re going to guard? That’s something that happens immediately.’’
It’s something that hasn’t happened enough so far.
The Bulls were outmanned in their season-opening loss to the Raptors, then showed some fight in their victory against the Bucks. But the last two games — against the Wizards and Celtics — featured too many let-go-of-the-rope moments, starting with poor play in the third quarter.
At least against the Wizards, the Bulls fought back in the fourth quarter to make the game competitive. That wasn’t the case, however, against the Celtics, who outscored the Bulls 39-21 in the third quarter and never looked back.
‘‘I think we start games all right,’’ guard Josh Giddey said. ‘‘It’s just the third quarter that’s kind of killing us and what we’ve got to get better at. It’s been a couple of games now that the first unit has started off slow, then we’re relying on our second unit to pick us back up. So it starts with us.
‘‘If you look at it from a game perspective, that’s probably an issue. But there are a lot of things beneath that that we need to clean up if we want to be competitive. I’ve got to be way better. We’ve got to figure it out together.’’
That’s what Powell was signed to do: help the team figure out how to deal with obstacles a rebuild presents.
‘‘I’m going to continue to stay on them, continue to talk about what I see,’’ Powell said of his role as veteran leader. ‘‘I’m still learning each and every one of them. But if I see something, [I] talk to them as a collective [or] talk to guys individually of how we can be better.
‘‘A lot of games are lost in the third quarter. You’ve got to come out [from halftime] with the right mindset, pay attention to detail, the same aggressiveness offensively and defensively as a collective. It’s not one person. Just collectively, we’ve got to be better.’’
That’s because Powell knows what’s coming. The Bulls host the defending NBA champion Knicks on Wednesday before going on a three-game road trip to face the Celtics again, the 76ers and the Knicks again.
The effort parts of the game, specifically rebounding and physicality, won’t be optional for Powell.
‘‘We’ve talked about it,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s something we’ve got to understand and pick up because I told them [that] with these games coming up, we can be on the outside looking in really quickly. We’ve got to fix that effort on [the defensive] side of the ball.’’