The Chicago Bulls—I know! Listen, I know. It is March 28. Baseball has returned. Redbuds and daffodils are blossoming. Goldfinches are going yellow. There are better things to talk about, and even if there weren't, there would be more serious things to talk about than this goofy-ass basketball team, which has been mired in miserable grinding sub-mediocrity for, Christ, a decade! Nevertheless, here we are. As I was saying: The Chicago Bulls—and really we are never going to get to the end of this if you can't dispense with the whole groaning eye-roll thing, so please—are on one. It cannot be denied. These chaotic rebuilding bozos are currently shredding just about everything in their path. They've now won four in a row, and nine of their last 11. These are not horseshit wins: Over this run they have beaten seven teams that are currently in playoff position. Thursday night they beat the Lakers for the second time in five days; in between they exhausted and befuddled and totally worked over the Denver Nuggets.
That first win over the Lakers was an eye-popping beatdown, a 31-point destruction in Los Angeles against a would-be title contender very much motivated to reverse a recent swoon. The Bulls were out of their minds: Josh Giddey had 17 assists and eight steals; rookie Matas Buzelis put up a career-best 31 points; Coby White scored 36 on just 17 shot attempts. The Lakers were made to look dumpy and slow, and came to Chicago Thursday hoping for a better showing. Instead they spent most of the early stages of the game once again being made to look like old tired uncles, falling behind early and trailing the floppy-haired Bulls by as many as 13 points, and only scrapping back to within a possession in the final minutes before halftime. The game turned in the second half, and the Lakers built up a 19-point lead early in the fourth quarter. This was a win in-hand for a fairly desperate veteran team.
The lead was still seven points inside of the final 90 seconds when Giddey drove baseline and dropped in a tough layup through contact, then sank the freebie to keep the Bulls within punching range. The Lakers ran some butt offense on their subsequent possession and Luka Doncic missed a step-back mid-ranger. The Bulls came back and Kevin Huerter buried a very bold 29-footer directly in the face of LeBron James, making it a one-point game with 46 seconds on the clock. The Lakers once again ran some genuinely fucked-up, horrendous offense, putting Austin Reaves in an advantageous mismatch but without any movement to occupy the defensive help and with Doncic stationed more than 30 feet from the basket. Reeves dribbled into an insanely difficult, banked, fallaway jumper that offended the gods but splashed home. The lead was stretched to three, with 27 seconds left.
I do not have Nate Silver's hot-shit algorithms, but this is a damn win. It became even more a win on Chicago's next possession, when Giddey airballed a layup with 13 seconds on the clock and the Bulls were forced to foul Reaves in order to stop the clock. Reaves made the free throws to push the margin to five points. Billy Donovan used a timeout to draw up a play and to bring the ball into the front court. The play out of the timeout was nothing special, but the Lakers biffed their coverage, with both James and Dorian Finney-Smith briefly covering no one at all, and a lovely one-touch pass from Nikola Vucevic set Patrick Williams up with a wide-open corner three, which he buried.
LeBron then made an insanely dumb mistake, especially for a 40-year-old veteran who has played through every conceivable basketball situation many times over. The thing the Bulls did most right in this sequence was pivot from the made three-pointer directly into an intense and organized full-court press, and LeBron, perhaps failing to appreciate the seriousness of the situation, threw a soft narrow-angle bounce-pass to Reaves, who was attempting to carve out a sliver of space between Williams and Giddey, both of whom are larger and longer than he is. Giddey simply stuck a hand out and tipped the ball, and then swarmed over and gathered it.
"We put ourselves in position to win, gave up a lot of threes in the fourth quarter, still put ourselves in position to win. Horrible turnover by myself," said James, after the game, also acknowledging the miscommunication that left Williams open in the corner. The Bulls still had to cash in on LeBron's error, and did: In a really proud display of court-awareness, White was positioned one pass away, composed and ready to shoot, and Giddey found him. White's three-pointer put the Bulls up a point and sent the crowd into delirium. This ruled.
But it's not over! The Lakers had a timeout, and used it, and head coach JJ Redick—though I'm sure he would've preferred to use this time tearing his former podcast co-host's head off with his bare hands—drew up an inbounds play that involved all of James, Doncic, and Reaves, and deployed the two superstars as decoys for the third, who flinched as if initiating a hand-off and then raced past Williams for an athletic scooped layup to put the Lakers back in front, this time with just three seconds on the clock. The Bulls, down a point, did not have a timeout, and thus could neither draw up a play nor advance the ball without running clock.
I'm not sure if standing or sitting is better for the watching of this clip. In any case I would like to warn you that you might involuntarily shout:
The Bulls have been awful television for years and years, even when they were on the upper arc of their miserable oscillation of mediocrity. This season they've been somewhat more energetic, shooting tons of threes and running a lot and injecting so much chaos into every game. I have still mostly not enjoyed it very much, but the basketball and the results have both improved by quite a lot in the time since they traded away Zach LaVine, nominally a star-level player but in fact a big drag whose deficits as an alpha scorer make it impossible for his team to play coherent basketball around him. Without LaVine soaking up possessions, the Bulls are fully committed to the sprint-and-bomb lifestyle, and it is suiting their young goofballs quite well.
The Bulls attempt the second-most threes per game in the league, and they generate the second-most shots per game in transition. They're not very good at defensive playmaking—they rank in the bottom third of the league in both steals and blocks—but their willingness to run off of made baskets takes advantage of their athleticism and decently distributed on-ball skills, and their willingness to bomb in basically all circumstances at least raises the ceiling on what their offense can produce. A typical Bulls possession sees Giddey dribbling the ball from one end of the court to the other at full speed, and then either kicking it out for an open three or throwing himself into a defender in order to draw a foul. The other team's reaction is to just kind of look annoyed, as if to say, Are these guys being serious right now?
"The way we play the game, I think it wears people down," said Giddey, after the win. "We get up and down. We run. We put heat on them to get back. A lot of veteran teams don't particularly want to get back and play in transition." I have absolutely no insight into whether this run of form by the young Bulls is sustainable, but Bulls fans deserve some good times. Also, barring some sort of disaster, some team is going to catch these absolute maniacs in the play-in, or later, at which point they will have to deal with Giddey spending the entire game in a fast break while White makes every audacious shot he takes. I am starting to get the feeling that these Bulls are going to end some would-be contender's promising season in a cyclone of total chaos.
