There’s a moment when the ball hovers beneath DeMar DeRozan’s hand in the fourth quarter that seems to hum with magic.
Mostly, it’s expectation. In his first season with the Chicago Bulls, the five-time All-Star already wrote himself into franchise lore with a seemingly endless stream of late-game heroics and last-second haymakers.
So when DeRozan weaved his way into the paint Thursday with a one-point deficit to the Atlanta Hawks, the United Center crowd held its collective breath with expectancy rather than anticipation. The twirling, off-balance, go-ahead jump shot with 15.1 seconds left felt like a promise.
“You love it and you hate it, you know?” DeRozan said. “Of course you don’t want to be down and have that pressure on yourself to try to pull out a game, but when you’re in those moments, you’ve got to take it on. I love the moments. I love the challenge. I love the opportunity. It’s fun to me.”
Before the first game back from the All-Star break, coach Billy Donovan said the Bulls need to figure out what to do if DeRozan has an off night. But the Bulls didn’t need to find that answer Thursday.
DeRozan scored 37 points, including that deciding three-point play, in a 112-108 win over the Hawks, continuing a record streak of eight games scoring at least 35 points and shooting over 50%.
“It’s history. We’re witnessing history,” rookie Ayo Dosunmu said. “What we are witnessing is something that people are going to remember for a long time. It’s one of those things where it’s going to be a record for a pretty long time. He wants to win and he makes the right play at all the times.”
The Bulls are now sitting atop the Eastern Conference and riding a six-game winning streak. But as they face one of the hardest schedule in the league to close out the regular season, Donovan wasn’t satisfied as he entered Thursday’s game.
Donovan set a fixed focus on the Bulls defense, which tumbled from top 10 to 19th overall in the two-month span without Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso. Defense will be the separating factor for the Bulls’ success in the final stretch of the season — and Donovan felt the Hawks provided the perfect test right out of the break.
The Hawks are second overall in the NBA in offensive rating, averaging 113.9 points per game. For Donovan, the game served as a critical gauge after months of porous defending.
“What we’ve done up to this point in time, in my opinion, is just not good enough,” Donovan said. “I’m not trying to be negative, it’s just we’ve got to get better. … We were dealing with a lot. I thought the guys did a really really good job settling the ship, so to speak, with a lot of turbulence. But the reality is what we’ve done up to this point in time in terms of going forward — where we want to be, the kind of team that we want to be — we’ve got to get better. It’s not good enough right now.”
It wasn’t a perfect defensive performance by any means. The Hawks shot 28.6% from behind the arc and went 18-for-27 from the free-throw line. The Bulls allowed 24 second-chance points and gave up 13 offensive rebounds. But they still managed to hold a top-five offensive team under 110 points after allowing 115 or more points in 10 of the last 12 games.
The deciding factor was the diminished production of Trae Young, who typically leads the Hawks, averaging 27.8 points and 9.3 assists per game.
Young was a hollowed version of himself Thursday, scoring only 14 points on 17.6% shooting and turning the ball over five times. Ayo Dosunmu was the reason.
The rookie had guarded Young once before this season, and he slipped back into the role with familiarity. Dosunmu spent most of the game glued closely to Young’s side, bumping him off his 3-point cadence and wielding his lanky arms to deflect and disrupt every attempt for the ball to exit Young’s hands.
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Dosunmu scored 12 points, cornering his scoring in key moments. He drained back-to-back 3-pointers in the third quarter, then sent Young skating bowlegged into the paint with a crossover for another basket in the fourth quarter.
But Dosunmu truly won the matchup in the final two minutes of the game, denying Young the chance for potential game-winning 3-pointers three times to clinch the win.
“They kept running the same play where they was trying to get the switch,” Dosunmu said. “I told Javonte (Green), ‘I’m just going to stay on him and get a stop.’ I really just tried to focus trying to remember all of his combinations because I knew that good players, All-Stars, they always go to their go-to moves when it’s winning time. … I just wanted to give him length, of course not give up the 3 and just try to contest without fouling.”
While Zach LaVine scored 20 points in his first game back from undergoing knee injections from a specialist, Nikola Vucevic suffered a blip in his otherwise uphill shooting, going 4-for-13 from the field.
The lack of offense from the Bulls starting center might have made a larger impact if it weren’t for the recent addition of Tristan Thompson.
Thompson brought both the depth and physical presence in the paint the Bulls have craved all season, scoring 11 points and grabbing six rebounds in 13 minutes off the bench. After crashing through two defenders to jam a two-handed dunk in the fourth quarter, Thompson swung off the rim and shouted at the United Center crowd, which eagerly matched his volume in cheers.
The performance was an immediate upgrade at backup center, where Tony Bradley had scored 11 points in the entirety of February. Although Vucevic entered the All-Star break on a hot streak, Thompson’s efficiency helped the Bulls to absorb a low-shooting night from their starting center.
For DeRozan, Thompson’s fit into the roster wasn’t a surprise after years of playing against the center in the Eastern Conference.
“Understanding what he brings, I know every bit of it,” DeRozan said. “It was fun to see us in the same jersey tonight. You could tell his impact what it brings right away.”