CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan said the team's first-round draft pick hasn't been a part of his conversations with the front office and ownership ahead of next month's NBA trade deadline.
Chicago has won four of five after Monday night's 114-110 victory over San Antonio, leaving the Bulls with a 17-19 record. Chicago owes its first-round selection in the 2025 draft to San Antonio as part of the 2021 DeMar DeRozan trade, but the pick is top-10 protected.
“No one's saying to me, hey, listen, wait a second with this draft pick right now, we need to make sure, it's been always the integrity of competition and playing,” Donovan said, “and I appreciate that.”
While Donovan said the pick hasn't been part of his conversations with the team, he also acknowledged the location of the organization in the NBA hierarchy. The Bulls went 40-42 during the 2022-23 season and 39-43 last year.
“We don't want to be just stuck in the middle. ... Absolutely. I don't think there's any question about that,” Donovan said.
“I think the building out part that we got to look at is the totality of our entire team where you're identifying guys that are going to help us maybe get out of the middle and move forward. And I do think that we do have guys on our team that, to me, emulate or model a competitiveness that I like and appreciate.”
The Bulls were without Ayo Dosunmu for the sixth straight game on Monday night because of a strained right calf. Dosunmu, who turns 25 on Jan. 17, is averaging 12.6 points and 4.8 assists in his fourth NBA season.
Dosunmu is doing some rehab work, Donovan said, but he has experienced some soreness when he tries run hard straight ahead.
“I think with where it is, in the lower part of his calf, they're just going to be careful,” Donovan said.
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Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan directs his team during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the San Antonio Spurs in Chicago, Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan, center, reacts during the first half of an NBA basketball game against the San Antonio Spurs in Chicago, Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan, right, looks at San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich during the second half of an NBA basketball game in Chicago, Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would move to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a name he said has a “beautiful ring to it.”
It's his latest suggestion to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere. Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st State,” demanded that Denmark consider ceding Greenland, and called for Panama to return the Panama Canal.
Here's a look at his comment and what goes into a name.
Since his first run for the White House in 2016, Trump has repeatedly clashed with Mexico over a number of issues, including border security and the imposition of tariffs on imported goods. He vowed then to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. The U.S. ultimately constructed or refurbished about 450 miles of wall during his first term.
The Gulf of Mexico is often referred to as the United States' “Third Coast” due to its coastline across five southeastern states. Mexicans use a Spanish version of the same name for the gulf: “El Golfo de México.”
Americans and Mexicans diverge on what to call another key body of water, the river that forms the border between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. Americans call it the Rio Grande; Mexicans call it the Rio Bravo.
Maybe, but it's not a unilateral decision, and other countries don't have to go along.
The International Hydrographic Organization — of which both the United States and Mexico are members — works to ensure all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. There are instances where countries refer to the same body of water or landmark by different names in their own documentation.
It can be easier when a landmark or body of water is within a country's boundaries. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama approved an order from the Department of Interior to rename Mount McKinley — the highest peak in North America — to Denali, a move that Trump has also said he wants to reverse.
Just after Trump's comments on Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said during an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson that she would direct her staff to draft legislation to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, a move she said would take care of funding for new maps and administrative policy materials throughout the federal government.
The body of water has been depicted with that name for more than four centuries, an original determination believed to have been taken from a Native American city of “Mexico.”
Yes. In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a bill to rename portions of the gulf that touch that state's beaches “Gulf of America,” a move the bill author later referred to as a “joke.” That bill, which was referred to a committee, did not pass.
Two years earlier, comedian Stephen Colbert had joked on his show that, following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it should be renamed “Gulf of America” because, "We broke it, we bought it.”
There's a long-running dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan among Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, with South Korea arguing that the current name wasn't commonly used until Korea was under Japanese rule. At an International Hydrographic Organization meeting in 2020, member states agreed on a plan to replace names with numerical identifiers and develop a new digital standard for modern geographic information systems.
The Persian Gulf has been widely known by that name since the 16th century, although usage of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in many countries in the Middle East. The government of Iran threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the company's decision not to label the body of water at all on its maps.
There have been other conversations about bodies of water, including from Trump’s 2016 opponent. According to materials revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of her campaign chairman’s personal account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 told an audience that, by China’s logic that it claimed nearly the entirety of the South China Sea, then the U.S. after World War II could have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”
Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.
President-elect Donald Trump walks from the podium after a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
