In "one of the best wins I've ever been a part of" Josh Giddey, Nikola Vučević help lift Bulls to 113-111 comeback victory over Sixers and the top of Eastern Conference
- Drew Stevens (@Drew_H_Stevens)
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
There were 14 seconds in regulation, the Chicago Bulls were surging back to the land of the living, and Nikola Vučević was lost.
He knew a play had been drawn up for him to set a screen for Josh Giddey, but he couldn’t see what he was supposed to do next, so he asked Billy Donovan.
“He said ‘just go to the corner.’”
So there he went when, some nine seconds later after Giddey drove into the lane and whipped a left-handed pass around Joel Embiid and straight into his shooting pocket, he found himself with nothing but space and opportunity.
“I saw somebody close at me, and I just tried to shoot as high as I can. Glad it went down. Big shot for us.”
Vučević’s one and only bucket from long distance represented the Bulls’ first lead of the game and put the finishing touches on their 113-111, come-from-behind victory over the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday.
Not only do the Bulls (6-1) now sit all by their lonesome atop the Eastern Conference, they possess the second-highest winning percentage in the league to boot. For a team expected to be fun, competitive but, ultimately, an also-ran, playing without Coby White, Zach Collins and, for the past two games, Ayo Dosunmu, this seven-game stretch has come out of left field.
But the lesson of giving up a 45-point first quarter and crawling into what was, at one time, a 24-point hole, wasn’t lost in the locker room.
“Tonight was one of the best wins that I’ve ever been a part of,” Giddey said, “just in terms of how bad we were down. To gut that one out and dig ourselves out of the hole like we did, was unbelievable. And I thought, both units, first and second, did an unbelievable job, probably in the last 18 minutes of the game, to really bring it back. We rebounded. We were physical. We did the things that we needed to do.
“To be the team that we want to be, that has to be a 48-minute thing. We can’t wait until we’re down 20 to start doing those things.”
With White (right calf strain) a week away from even practicing, Dosunmu (left quad contusion) still day-to-day, and a month that’ll see the Bulls play 10 more games away from home and four sets of back-to-backs, starting in Milwaukee on Friday, they certainly cannot.
Josh Giddey, Found Money?
With 29 points, 15 rebounds and 12 assists on Tuesday, Josh Giddey became the first Bull to mess around and record back-to-back triple-doubles since Michael Jordan did it some 37 years ago.
That the 23-year-old former sixth-overall pick is piling up numbers isn’t a surprise. Conventional wisdom suggested he would, especially once he was handed the keys to the offense in February and a four-year, $100 million contract in September.
The plot twist is Giddey shooting 57.1% on 14 catch-and-shoot threes, attempting six fewer free throws than New York Knick and known grifter Jalen Brunson and the Bulls boasting what would be the eighth-stingiest defense in the league with him on the court.
“You get confidence from your teammates and your coaches believing in you and trusting you to make plays, said Giddey, who’s averaging 23 points, 10 rebounds and 9.1 assists. “I’m very, very grateful and thankful for them, that they put me in position to be successful.”
To date, Giddey has 20 triple-doubles to his name, nine of which he’s collected for the Bulls, who are now 8-1 when he’s done so.
“He just makes a lot of plays for us,” said Nikola Vučević, “with his scoring, with his playmaking, even just getting downhill and creating inside-out action for us.”
Like the Bulls, Giddey still has more to prove before every single concern can be put to bed. But to this point, he’s answered every bell and looks like an All-Star in waiting.
Is it really real?
While the Bulls deserve credit for getting off the mat, playing with force and meeting Tyrese Maxey with more resistance in the second half of the game on Tuesday, Philadelphia was an accomplice in its own demise down the stretch.
The two points Maxey scored on a layup to make it 109-100 at the 6:26 mark of the fourth quarter were the last the Sixers scored that didn’t come from the free-throw line. Maxey, who finished with a game-high 39 points, missed his final five field-goal attempts, as did Joel Embiid. Quentin Grimes, who came into the contest shooting 40.5% from beyond the arc, but missed all five of the threes he took, including the straightaway, would-be game winner.
“We were very, very fortunate to win,” Billy Donovan said. “I’m happy they fought, never gave up and really battled and really competed. But we’re not going to be a very, very good team if we just try to rely on running up and down the floor and shooting the ball and trying to get downhill and just spraying it around. We’ve gotta to be more physical."
“You can overcome good shooting nights if you do a lot of other things. We were fortunate that we did enough of them in the second half.”
Considering their honest-to-goodness camaraderie, next-man-up resilience and style of play, the Bulls have been a revelation.
But certain numbers might add up to impending regression. Like how inefficient (most of) their opponents have been from long range (34.2%), or how efficient they’ve been from long range (40.3%), or how they give up the largest amount of shots at the rim per game (34.6), or how they inexplicably morph into basketball’s version of the Monsters of the Midway in the clutch (58.8 defensive rating), or how three of the six teams they’ve faced are either at or below .500.
Of course, Donovan is just focused on the granularity of it all.
“We just don’t have the luxury to not invest the full 48 minutes on the physicality things,” Donovan said.
“We gotta put our bodies in plays. We gotta play more physical, we gotta collectively rebound, we have to share the ball, and we have to run. It takes a lot, both mentally and physically for them to do what I’m asking them to do. But if we don’t do those things, we don’t have enough margin for error to overcome. Every coach in this league right now is fighting for consistency. And that’s what we have to keep fighting for. When we do those things, we give ourselves the best opportunity.”