Chicago Bulls: 3 red hot players who can help beat the Lakers

Hot Chicago Bulls players that can help beat the Lakers: Zach LaVine

A good portion of this Bulls team is facing a homecoming of some sort in this stretch of back-to-back games in LA against the Clippers and Lakers. For the likes of Lonzo and Caruso, returning to LA means facing their former team in the Lakers.

Meanwhile, for star shooting guard Zach LaVine, it means returning to the part of the country where he played his college ball. LaVine played his college hoops with the UCLA Bruins and is getting to return to the west coast for this portion of the Bulls’ Western Conference road trip.

LaVine is playing really well of late for the Bulls. This all comes while he’s playing through a thumb injury in his non-shooting hand that is giving him some apparent discomfort with the ball in his hands at times.

But LaVine is powering through this injury. And hopefully, his solid performance in clutch time down the stretch in the Nov. 14 win over the Clippers means that he is turning around some of the consistency issues he put on display in the second half earlier this month.

If you get rid of one bad half of basketball against the Golden State Warriors in a bad loss on the road to the team with the NBA’s best record at this point of the season, LaVine was tremendous in the last four games. In fact, if you get rid of that half of basketball against the Warriors, LaVine is playing about his best ball of the season thus far.

He’s kept his streak of 20+ points per game up to 10 games at this point. And he’s remained a net positive on the floor for the Bulls in all but one of the last five games.

In the win over the Clippers, LaVine registered 29 points, eight rebounds, and two assists, while hitting six of his 13 attempts from beyond the arc. Keep up that scoring pace against the Lakers, and the Bulls should be in a good spot on Nov. 15.