CHICAGO — Twenty-four hours apart, the Chicago Bulls came eye-to-eye with greatness. Star-driven gut checks that siphoned air from a mystical start to their season.
The look they saw in Giannis Antetokounmpo’s eyes Friday, then, in Donovan Mitchell’s Saturday, runs deeper than any star gene. The feeling those two summoned in back-to-back Bulls losses were a product of battle scars accrued through years of learning to seize games. When all else fails, they snatch momentum with willpower and an insatiable flame for scoring. They craft realities governed by their decisions.
Decisiveness: something these Bulls can lose touch with in the early days of this system.
Chicago needed no reminder it lacks an apparent franchise player, an organization-altering talent who shapes games alone. They began this season — and have already instilled hope — with an understanding that their wins must come without one.
Instead, this weekend brought a humbling realization, which felt distant amid their awe-inspiring start: This revitalization is in its infancy.
That the Bulls stand 10 toes in their identity has masked their youth and inexperience. The template of a team that stormed atop the East standings remains. Chicago is fun, no doubt. Hopeful, indeed. Inspired, for sure. The Bulls will win games behind an exhausting playing style. They’re positioned to galvanize a fan base that hit snooze on the previous iteration.
But players like Antetokounmpo (16 playoff series) and Mitchell (12 playoff series) can rub together more postseason education than the top 11 of Chicago’s active rotation (24 series combined). In their game-deciding drives, the kind of two-minute drills franchise players produce, lies experience.
Sobering thoughts for a core that’s balled with drunken confidence. It all flashed before these Bulls as they fell over themselves this weekend.
“When teams have No. 1 guys — Giannis last night, Mitchell tonight — they’re the guys you want to get the ball out of their hands and don’t let them beat you,” guard Josh Giddey said Saturday night. “Happened both nights. And offensively, we didn’t execute at all. I put that on myself as a point guard. I’ve gotta do a better job of getting the guys organized and figuring out what we’re gonna run down the stretch.”
Conquering their minuscule margin of error requires focus. Adderall attentiveness. Kitchen-knife precision. Cohesion from an egalitarian offense, and effort from a defense without remarkable rim protection.
Antetokounmpo chose violence. He begged an ill-suited Bulls defense — armies would falter against this version of the Greek Freak — to challenge him, an unanswered call for physicality.
Chicago has framed physicality as a decision. In Friday’s fourth quarter, once a single-possession game, Antetokounmpo waltzed down the lane. He posted deep under the rim, unfazed by the Bulls’ listless collapse on him. He toggled between ferocious drives and feeding shooters who live and die by his gravity. Nineteen of his 41 points came in the period.
It left young Matas Buzelis sick, flushed with abashment. And on Saturday, another bout with foul trouble left him with a permanently piercing scowl.
As angelic as Chicago’s offense appears at its height, turnovers threaten its identity. The Bulls gnaw at glimpses of magnificence, when the cycle of cutting and screening and passing suggests cohesion. When the luster disappears, the other team is typically running with the ball.
Organization means everything. Giddey, with newfound confidence, has manufactured offense from the wackiest of lineups. On a bum ankle in Saturday’s close, he couldn’t.
So, Mitchell picked at that order. Probed its legitimacy. After going 1 of 10 in the first half, Mitchell was 9 of 14 in the second half to finish with 29 points. The sort of glass-break, late-game prowess in a star’s belt.
On a career night for backup big Jalen Smith, center Nikola Vučević was a flat-footed bystander to Mitchell’s reign.
As Giddey noted and Vučević later regurgitated, the Bulls “didn’t really communicate what we were supposed to run” late in their crumble in Cleveland.
The Bulls’ responses during Mitchell’s run? A missed layup from Giddey, grounded and slowed by at least a couple of miles per hour after his exit from the game; an offline Isaac Okoro 3 he initially rejected, stewed over, then chucked in desperation; a 7-foot jumper from Tre Jones, who’d previously lived on free throws, which sealed their fate.
An abandonment of the best version of Chicago’s offense. The 2000s babies reeked of youth.
“Stick to it,” Vučević said of the team’s style. “Not panic. Not try to go away from it and create something that we don’t usually work on or we don’t really do. Our offense has worked even in close games. … Just because the game gets close or slows down a bit doesn’t mean we have to go away from it.”
It’s early in the Bulls’ embrace and application of their identity, which required years of buy-in and last season’s reconfigurations to even materialize. Even through a perilous run of Eastern Conference playoff contenders, riddled with late-game scenarios, Chicago has clutched its formula.
It buzzed long enough as the NBA’s biggest surprise that this weekend’s abrupt halt to a magical run evoked expectations from fans. A belief that the Bulls found something in its season-opening run. A taste of what it takes to compete, at this juncture, without an apparent superstar.
They’ve earned chances to win. A seat at the table, both in comeback and collapse, to try to continuously stun the East.
Now, they’ll aim to continue to fight experience with the tools at their disposal — a wicked system powered by young legs, bundles of budding potential like Giddey and Buzelis and Coby White. If these first few weeks were any indicator, these Bulls will aim to inflate their youthful chests when this league’s stars inevitably demand their lunch money.
There’s more where this weekend came from.
