The Chicago Bulls entered Sunday’s 118-109 loss to the Nets in Brooklyn like a team eager to exorcise some demons.
For weeks, the team had been plagued by sluggish starts, digging deficits that couldn’t be overcome by strong second halves. On Sunday, things were different — at least for the first quarter.
The Bulls came out punching with an immediate play drawn up to give Zach LaVine a lob dunk. They opened the game on a 13-0 run and carved out a 21-point lead by the final two minutes of the frame.
The offense moved the ball decisively while the defense forced the Nets to settle for long-bomb 3-pointers. At the end of the quarter, the Bulls led 36-19. It was too good to be true.
Within minutes, the lead evaporated. The Nets erased the entire 21-point advantage midway through the second quarter. By the time the teams entered the locker room at the half, the Nets led by eight points — a 29-point swing.
It was a cataclysmic collapse — the type that only comes around every few decades. With their second-quarter meltdown, the Bulls became only the second NBA team since 1996-97 to lead by 20 or more points in a first quarter and then trail by 10 or more points in the second quarter of the same game, according to Sports Radar.
This team continued to make the wrong type of history as it dropped to a 5-13 record, the third-worst in the Eastern Conference.
“It’s just frustrating,” Zach LaVine said. “Nobody wants to be 5-13 or lose multiple games in a row. It doesn’t feel good. It didn’t feel like we would be at this point right now, but that’s our reality. So we’ve got to figure out a way to get out of that.”
Here are three other takeaways from the loss:
1. Bulls squander the lead in a matter of minutes.
The second quarter was defined by two changes — the Nets switched to a zone defense and started hitting their shots.
The combination seemed to paralyze the Bulls, who led by 17 points entering the quarter. The Nets opened with an 11-3 run and tied the game within six minutes. They torched the Bulls from long distance with 11-for-16 shooting behind the arc, fueling a 44-point quarter.
And the Bulls offense had no response as it was mired in the zone defense, which purposefully slowed down their hot start. The Bulls shot 25% from the field and did not have a single player make more than one field goal in the second quarter.
“It’s not always easy to play with a lead like that,” Nikola Vučević said. “It was a little bit unrealistic — we made everything and they missed everything. We knew it was going to balance out eventually. We just didn’t react well when that happened. When they made a run, when they cut it to 10, we didn’t take a breath. They were trying to play catch-up and fast and we played that instead of being smart about it, trying to control the game a little better.”
2. Nets live by the 3, Bulls die by it.
The 3-point arc was a friendly sight for the Bulls throughout their first-quarter surge. They opened the game 8-for-10 from the 3, a run that was fueled by Coby White and Patrick Williams, who combined for six 3-pointers in the first half. But from there, the shot dried up. The Bulls went 4-for-20 through the last three quarters.
The exact opposite was true for the Nets, who finished 25-for-53 from behind the arc, setting a Bulls franchise record for most 3-pointers allowed in a single game. Those shots accounted for 63.6% of the Nets’ total scoring in the game. Royce O’Neal and Lonnie Walker IV hit six 3-pointers apiece and six different Nets finished with two or more 3-pointers.
3. Alex Caruso misses his third game of the season with injury.
Alex Caruso sat out Sunday’s game in Brooklyn with a right foot injury, which occurred in Friday’s game in Toronto. Caruso exited the game against the Raptors early in the third quarter after his foot was stepped on, which reaggravated an injury from earlier in the season. He attempted to play Sunday, running through warmups before the Bulls medical team made the game-time determination that he was not fit to play.
This is the third full game that Caruso has missed due to injury this season. His absence brought Williams back into the starting lineup, where Caruso had previously stepped in as starting power forward.
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