INDIANAPOLIS — Good luck will always run out.
That’s a guarantee. It’s only ever a matter of time. And Wednesday night, the clock ran out on the Chicago Bulls in a 113-110 loss to the Indiana Pacers despite leading by double digits with nearly five minutes remaining in the game.
The collapse came out of nowhere — even for the Bulls who were on the court. They held a 14-point lead over the Pacers with just less than eight minutes left in the game. It wasn’t their most commanding offensive performance of the season, but holding a double-digit advantage seemed like it should be enough.
As the Pacers made one final, desperate surge at a comeback, the Bulls defense melted into passivity. They missed cutters on the backside and lost track of assignments on baseline out-of-bounds plays. They hacked at Pascal Siakam as he powered his way to the rim and allowed Jay Huff to hit a game-tying 3.
Coach Billy Donovan attempted to shore up the defense by pulling Josh Giddey off the court for nearly three minutes of clutch time, swapping the guard for Jalen Smith to bolster the team’s rim protection. But even that wasn’t enough to fend off the length and physicality of the Pacers. In a blur, the Pacers scored 28 points over the course of 7 minutes, 30 seconds.
“When you up by double digits in the fourth, you’ve got to put teams away,” Coby White said.
Aaron Nesmith landed the final blow of the game, stepping back to sink an unlikely midrange floater with 39 seconds remaining. White attempted to drive to the basket for a go-ahead layup with two seconds left only to find Nesmith playing hero again, swatting the ball away with his longer reach.
The loss highlighted a glaring weak point for the Bulls. Despite sitting well above them in the standings, they have failed to beat the Pacers — the worst team in the Eastern Conference — in three meetings this season. As a result, the Bulls have handed the Pacers three of their 12 wins.
Crumbling against beatable competition is a common theme for the Bulls, who have balanced out upset victories against teams such as the Minnesota Timberwolves and Boston Celtics with complete collapses against the Brooklyn Nets and Pacers. The Bulls are 3-9 against teams below them in the East standings.
“I don’t look at a team’s record,” Donovan said. “We don’t have those kinds of margins to look at it that way. We’re a team that’s striving and fighting to earn whatever it is we can earn. We don’t have the luxury to look at anybody and just sit there and say, ‘OK, we’re going to just go out there and win.’ I don’t believe that. To me, there’s a level of entitlement there where we can’t have that kind of approach or attitude. We’ve got to be hungry. We’ve got to realize that on any given night, we can beat anybody and on any given night, anybody can beat us.”
Here are three takeaways from the loss.
1. Lineup shakeup
Giddey returned to the starting lineup against the Pacers, his first start since suffering a hamstring strain that sidelined him for 11 games. This is a positive sign for Giddey, who will attempt to play both games of the back-to-back against the Pacers and Miami Heat. Although the guard remains under a minutes restriction — which Donovan described as a hard cap at 30 minutes — his availability over this upcoming stretch of four games in five days will be crucial for the Bulls to sustain their offense.
This meant moving away from the Bulls’ preferred starting lineup, which features a double-big combination of Smith and Nikola Vučević. Although the Bulls typically prefer this rotation, it was necessary to move Smith back to the bench to preserve the center pairing through this stretch of back-to-backs.
2. Changing tides
The Bulls went 4-1 over their last five-game stretch — getting back to .500 in the process — by averaging 20.2 3-pointers per game while shooting 44.7% from behind the arc. This is a scorching trend that the Bulls, realistically, always knew would end.
The Bulls did not see a noticeable dip in their accuracy against the Pacers, shooting 40% from behind the arc. But they did not produce the same volume of attempts from long range, making only 12 3s (representing a more than 24-point decrease from their recent hot streak). Matas Buzelis, Smith and Vučević combined for 10 of these 12 makes.
3. Fortune’s favor
Fortune favored the Bulls in the clutch for most of this season. Before Wednesday, the Bulls were 16-11 in games with a margin of five points or fewer in the final five minutes — and 12-3 in games that came down to a one-possession deficit in the final 10 seconds.
White acknowledged that a combination of luck and home-court advantage often has bolstered the Bulls in these scenarios, making the team wary of becoming overconfident in close games.
