This is what Bulls basketball should look like the rest of this season.
At least if they’re doing it right.
Three quarters of competitive, hard-nosed play, seven players in double-figures, and then getting completely overwhelmed in the final quarter in a dash for more draft lottery balls.
Thanks to Nikola Jokic passing Oscar Robertson for second-most triple doubles in NBA history (182), the Nuggets helped the Bulls out in the soft tank department, outscoring them 39-16 in the fourth to run away with the 136-120 victory Saturday at the United Center.
All Jokic did was finish with 22 points, 17 assists and 14 rebounds.
“I love watching (Jokic) play,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said of the accomplishment. “One, he impacts the game in so many ways. He does it with his passing, his screening, just a level of unselfishness and the way he plays the game is impressive.”
Donovan and his new-look squad got to see that up close and personal, especially in that final stanza in which Jokic finished a plus-19 in plus/minus in that quarter alone.
As for the new Bulls, Collin Sexton finished with 17, Nick Richards and Anfernee Simons each had 15, Guerschon Yabusele had 12, Jaden Ivey had 10, and Rob Dillingham had nine.
Matas Buzelis led the Bulls with 21 points as well as adding eight rebounds.
“The defense was not good,” Donovan said of the fourth-quarter meltdown. “We’re going to make some mistakes. The guys are all playing together, guys are forgetting plays, the spacing may not (be there), it’s going to happen, but we’ve got to get much, much better defensively.”
Poison Ivey
Jaden Ivey didn’t know the exact timeframe, but he knew it was quite some time since he put in a 33-minute work night like he did in his Bulls debut in Toronto on Thursday.
It was actually way back on Dec. 26, 2024, while he was still a regular fixture in the Pistons starting lineup to be exact.
No wonder the guard was admittedly feeling it.
“Obviously it’s taxing on my body, but shoot, so is basketball in general,” Ivey said. “I checked the stat sheet as far as my minutes and 33 minutes was probably the longest I’ve played in a while.”
As far as how he’s approaching figuring out how to play along all of his new teammates, yes, it feels like a pick-up game at the local gym.
“I mean yeah, you ask anybody that gets traded, nobody just comes in and, ‘Man, we got it down pat,’ “ Ivey added. “You gotta kind of figure it out and it takes time.”
A different view
Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas admittedly took a lot out of the 15-5 end of the regular-season run last year, and might have put too much stock into it.
Donovan was asked about the approach to the rest of this season’s sample size and made it clear that he looks at things differently.
“To me the thing that stood out to me more than anything else was the Miami (play-in) game,” Donovan said. “The 15-5, for me, because it was the end of the year and was such a mixed bag of teams. When there was a meaningful game, like a Game 7 so to speak, we got really dominated in that game.
“I looked at it from the lens of we’ve got a lot of growth yet to get better and a lot of that was, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get more physical.’ “