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The Chicago Bulls season ended with an air of inevitability Wednesday night as the team crumpled against the Milwaukee Bucks in a 116-100 Game 5 loss to close their best-of-seven first-round series.
The Bulls’ chances went from unlikely to grim after starters Alex Caruso (concussion) and Zach LaVine (COVID-19) were ruled out of Game 5 early Wednesday. Bucks fans weren’t excited as they trickled into Fiserv Forum — they were expectant.
Even Bulls coach Billy Donovan arrived in Milwaukee with dimmed positivity.
“We’ll see what happens tonight,” Donovan said before the game. “Look, stranger things have happened.”
The only unexpected part of the loss was DeMar DeRozan’s stat line.
Without LaVine available to balance the scoring, the weight of the Bulls offense fell fully onto DeRozan’s shoulders. After his 41-point performance in their Game 2 victory, the Bulls knew what DeRozan is capable of under duress — but so did the Bucks, who spent the night throwing themselves in the All-Star forward’s way.
DeRozan couldn’t cut through the swarm of Bucks defenders who surrounded him anytime he touched the ball. Every look DeRozan took at the basket was obscured by a double or triple team, and he took only one shot in the first quarter.
“I expected it, but I didn’t want to get carried away and just try to go out there and shoot 30 times,” DeRozan said. “I trusted my guys. I didn’t care how many shots they missed, whenever I felt I had the right pass to make, I tried to make the right play.”
DeRozan finished with 11 points on 5-of-10 shooting despite spending only five minutes on the bench.
The Bucks were clearly content to allow any other player in a Bulls jersey to take a shot — so long as it wasn’t DeRozan. The tactic paid off in spades.
Time after time, DeRozan drove into a triple team, then flipped the ball out to the perimeter. But each time, the result was the same. Air ball. Brick. Turnover. The Bulls moved the ball more fluidly than they had in most of the series, but none of that mattered when the shots didn’t fall.
The Bulls shot 42.4% from the field and made just 15 of their franchise-record 52 attempts behind the 3-point arc (28.8%). Rookie Ayo Dosunmu started his first playoff game in place of Caruso at point guard and finished with eight points and one assist. Coby White finished an ice-cold shooting series with 17 points on 4-for-13 3-point shooting.
Patrick Williams led the Bulls in scoring with 22 points but couldn’t match the aggression of the Bucks at the rim. Nikola Vučević scored 19 points and went 3-for-9 from 3-point range.
“We’re certainly a better shooting team than what we showed today,” Donovan said.
The loss capped a dismal offensive series against the Bucks. The Bulls finished the five games shooting less than 40% from the field and averaging 95.2 points.
Things got ugly by the 9:41 mark of the second quarter, when the Bucks doubled the score at 40-20. Giannis Antetokounmpo led the Bucks with 33 points as they shot 49.4% from the field. The Bulls halved the deficit in the third quarter, but a flurry of six 3-pointers helped the Bucks rumble back to a 20-point lead.
The loss left a sour note at the end of a season of growth for the Bulls, who returned to the postseason and finished with a winning record for the first time in five years. DeRozan’s arrival in Chicago sparked a season of broken records and winning streaks.
But a litany of injuries — from Williams’ wrist surgery and Lonzo Ball’s season-ending meniscus tear to Caruso’s concussion in Game 4 — clouded the potential of the improved Bulls roster.
With LaVine out of contract for the 2022-23 season, the offseason could bring another period of change for the Bulls. Regardless of the roster makeup, Donovan feels expectations are raised for next season.
“We’ll actually have to work harder going into this offseason and next year to even get back to this point,” Donovan said. “A lot of people were uncertain what our team would look like, and as they started to go through the year, I think (the Bulls) earned and gained more and more respect around the league. It’ll be a lot harder next year.”
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