Awful.
The Chicago Bulls lost 105-98 and blew an 18-point lead to the New York Knicks.
Former-Bull Bobby Portis dropped 28 points and hit a three-point bucket to give the Knicks their first lead of the game at the 1:47 minute mark. As for the Bulls, they’d fail to score for the final 3:33 minutes, letting the Knicks cap off a 15-0 run to win the game.
This isn’t about growing pains. This isn’t about chemistry. This isn’t about one player. This is about bad basketball.
The Bulls tricked all of us by playing their best 1st quarter of the season, grabbing a 33-15 advantage. After that, they were outscored every quarter and slowly let the Knicks climb back into the game. How? Well, being outrebounded on the offensive boards 25-9 doesn’t help. Oh, and shooting 25.7 percent from behind the arc isn’t going to win you games. But, ultimately, as the game grew close it came down to one thing … decision making.
Jim Boylen played Coby White and Ryan Arcidiacono the same amount of minutes. Zach LaVine played hero ball. The team took contested shots. Everything was out of sync when the game mattered the most. The ball movement that was so strongly demonstrated in the 1st quarter, the same one that gave the Bulls a 33-15 advantage, transformed into iso-ball. When the clock hit 3:33, it became every man for himself.
Horrible. And Zach LaVine knows it.
"We keep pissing away wins. I feel like we should be 3-1 right now, but it's flipped around." pic.twitter.com/Yv8htxSWij
— Bulls Talk (@NBCSBulls) October 29, 2019
We might be only four games into the season, but the word “playoffs” feels as foreign to the Bulls as the concept of closing games.