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The Chicago Bulls picked a hell of a night to play their best game of the season.
The Bulls won Wednesday’s single-elimination Play-In game against the Atlanta Hawks, keeping their season alive for a chance at the eighth seed against the Miami Heat. The two teams will meet in south Florida on Friday night.
The total of 131 points tied their fifth-highest single-game scoring output of the season. Their 56.8 field goal percentage and 63.3 effective field goal percentages each rank fourth best on the season. The Bulls committed only seven turnovers, shot 42.3 percent from distance and rebounded a higher percentage of their own misses than the Hawks.
The Bulls average 48.4 points in the paint per game (21st). They had 72 paint points against the Hawks, which would have been the second-most in a game all season. Aside from putting the Hawks on the free throw line 28 times, this was about as well as the Bulls could have possibly executed the strategy they have been working on over the past two seasons.
None of that would have happened without a breakout game from Coby White, who scored 42 points, and added nine rebounds and six assists.
“He did alright,” DeMar DeRozan joked with White sitting next to him on the podium. “He led us tonight.”
Technically, White’s 42-points won’t show up as a career-high, even though it was the most he has scored in an NBA game — Play-In stats don’t count towards regular season or post-season numbers.
Doesn’t matter to him, he’s counting it.
“I’m definitely counting it as my career high,” he said. “It’s on the stat sheet right here.”
White was masterful. He was 15-of-21 from the field, including 9-of-10 in the restricted area, resulting from the aggressive driving game that earned him five trips to the free throw line, where he went 9-of-10.
“It was great,” Billy Donovan said after the game. “I think for him, it really was, he set the tone getting downhill. We talked about it for a couple days. And you know, he did a really good job playing aggressively and playing downhill. Took his threes when they were there. And then you know, made a lot of really good passes to guys. I thought he played a really a complete game. I know the number 42 is a huge number. And it’s phenomenal, but I thought he played a really complete game. I thought he defended, I thought he assists, I thought he got downhill and made the game easy for guys.”
Having been torched from three by the Hawks in their most recent contest, the Bulls knew they needed to improve their dominance of the paint to offset that disparity.
“We’re probably not going to get the volume of three-point shots up that they do, you know, with Murray, Bogdanovic, and Trae Young,” Donovan said. “I think for us we needed to get downhill and attack the paint and I thought we did you know from our last game against them a much much better job of that. And certainly Coby was a catalyst.”
The Bulls also defended at a high level. Though the Hawks scored 116, Trae Young shot just 4-of-12 and had six turnovers. Their team as a whole shot 45.1 percent from the field and 29.7 percent from three.
Just about everything went right for the Bulls in that game. Ayo Dosunmu returned from injury to a huge game (19 points on 8-of-12 shooting). Andre Drummond was able to return from injury as well. Only one player on the team shot below 50 percent. DeRozan (22 points on 10-of-19 shooting) scored over double coverage or found teammates for assists.
These Play-In games are the one time when it’s acceptable to get excited by a big game in a small sample, but the work is not done yet. This was the 36-win Hawks, missing three of their top-rotation players, and whose defense is bottom-five in the NBA. The Bulls will have to replicate this level of play again in Miami on Friday night to earn a trip to the Playoffs.
And that level of consistency has evaded the Bulls during this entire era.
It may be easier to squeak by the Heat if they are without Jimmy Butler, who will undergo imaging on his knee, which he injured early against the Philadelphia 76ers in the 7 vs. 8 matchup. Early reports indicate Butler could be sidelined indefinitely with an MCL injury.
The Bulls will also have to monitor Alex Caruso’s status. Caruso injured his left ankle in the second quarter when Andre Drummond crashed into him.
Despite the injury appearing to affect Caruso’s right ankle, it is actually the left ankle that is bothering him.
“He just caught me on my right foot that like kind of gave out so my left foot tried to catch me and I just kind of tweaked my ankle a little bit,” Caruso said. “That same one that I was dealing with for the last couple weeks of season that we’re managing.”
ESPN reported that the sprain was “significant” Caruso’s availability is in doubt. Caruso, however, says he expects to play.
“Yeah, I mean I do until I can’t,” he said. “So we’ll see how it goes in the next couple days but my mindset will be to play ’till my body tells me they can’t.”
Up next: A re-match of last season’s Play-In game against the Miami Heat with the Playoffs on the line.
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