Bulls players react to latest health protocol entries originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
The Chicago Bulls are in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak.
Sunday morning, Zach LaVine and Troy Brown Jr. became the latest players on the team to enter the NBA's health and safety protocols; as of their entries, nine of the team's 19 rostered players — Coby White, Javonte Green, DeMar DeRozan, Matt Thomas, Derrick Jones Jr., Ayo Dosunmu and Stanley Johnson — are in protocols.
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In turn, a handful of Bulls players took to Twitter on Sunday to react to the team's state of affairs.
Brown Jr. boiled his emotions down to a single emoji after entering protocols:
Alize Johnson, who is now one of just nine available players for the Bulls, was as shocked as anyone:
And Nikola Vučević, who missed seven games in November after testing positive for COVID-19, broke the tension with a bit of dry humor:
Thankfully, Bulls head coach Billy Donovan said before Saturday's loss to the Heat that most of the players in protocols he's spoken to are either experiencing mild symptoms or are asymptomatic.
"Maybe some of it's from the vaccination, we've got a lot of guys sitting home with no symptoms," Donovan said. "And that's obviously a good thing too, because I think when guys have gone through real, real difficulty of getting really, really sick, it's really made it a lot harder for them coming back."
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The Bulls are a fully vaccinated team, and Vučević said after the Miami game most had received booster shots.
Now, they hope the string of recent protocol entries ceases and the team can shift its attention back to returning sidelined players. White and Green will have passed 10 days in protocols by Tuesday's game against the Pistons, but their statuses are yet unclear.
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