Former Bulls guard Zach LaVine wasn’t done putting up shots late Wednesday night.
He burst into his old locker room with a towel in his hand after the game, saw his former “student” surrounded by cameras and microphones, then tossed the towel directly at Matas Buzelis’ head while he was in mid-sentence.
It was the only way to slow him down.
LaVine and the Kings didn’t have an answer for Buzelis, who had 27 points in the Bulls’ 126-113 victory and shot 11-for-18 from the field, including 4-for-6 from three-point range.
After the interview, Buzelis hugged it out with LaVine one last time before the visiting party had to depart, but they’ll stay in touch. Since LaVine was traded to Sacramento last February, they haven’t stopped talking.
They built that strong bond last season.
For Buzelis, LaVine was the superstar high-flier he grew up watching. For LaVine, Buzelis was a can’t-miss prospect who asked all the right questions.
Early last season, LaVine was one of Buzelis’ bigger hype men, telling the media frequently about how good the kid could be. He’s proving to be spot-on.
“No, this is just the trajectory that he’s going to be on,” LaVine said when asked if he was surprised by how quickly Buzelis has climbed. “The athleticism and mindset were always there. Every time I came back and worked at the Advocate Center, he was asking me, ‘Can I come in with you?’ You’re just going to see his development get better and better. He can do it all. The more he homes in on his shot and shot creation off the dribble, he’s a three-level scorer. Then combo that with his defensive ability and ability to get to the hoop, I’m not surprised. I just want him to keep getting better.”
Both men agree on that plan.
Buzelis also went out of his way to publicly thank LaVine for the time he invested in him over the last year. When he has questions for LaVine, despite being thousands of miles away and on a different team, he still gets a response.
“I pay my homage to him; he’s an amazing guy,” Buzelis said. “He answers all the questions I have, texts, amazing role model. He was a superstar teammate. He was a great leader, and I thank him for still answering the phone, and that’s my guy.”
LaVine isn’t the only one helping in the education of Buzelis, however. It’s a village, and Bulls coach Billy Donovan is the mayor of that town.
After a disappointing three-point performance in Orlando last week in which Buzelis was in foul trouble all night, he pulled Donovan aside and had a heart-to-heart with him about not letting that happen again.
“When things don’t go well for him, he takes it and uses it as a learning experience, kind of comes back better from it, and he leans into that stuff,” Donovan said. “I think that’s why, quite honestly, he’s been able to progress at the rate that he’s progressed because he takes his experiences and learns from them. But he doesn’t get down and dwell on it. He kind of just moves on to the next thing.
“Listen, there’s going to be a lot of those moments where you come out of a game like Orlando, whether it was foul trouble or a certain matchup he got, where there’s still going to be a lot of growth for him. But I love the way he tries to compete, the way he plays and how driven he is to be a really, really good player.”
