Chicago Bulls Learning Necessary Lesson in Playoff Readiness Against Bucks
MILWAUKEE—Since the start of his tenure with the Chicago Bulls five years ago, Tom Thibodeau has preached a formula for winning with five core tenets. Rebounding, defending, sharing the ball and playing inside-out offense are the first four.
Check off those four boxes for Saturday. The Bulls outrebounded the Milwaukee Bucks, 39 to 34. They logged 23 assists on 33 made field-goals. They shot 55.6 percent from three-point range and held the Bucks to under 40 percent from the field.
It was the fifth piece of Thibodeau’s philosophy, and maybe the simplest one of all, that did the Bulls in: Controlling their turnovers and taking care of the ball.
Ideally, Thibodeau would like his team to have 13 or fewer turnovers per game. That’s the number he’s set as the benchmark for a responsible offensive performance. The Bulls more than doubled that in Saturday’s 92-90 loss to the Bucks. They coughed the ball up a season-high 26 times, leading to 39 Milwaukee points. That’s the game, and the Bulls know it.
“It’s a hard one,” Derrick Rose said after the game. “I feel like I had 20 of them.”
He actually only had eight, which led the team, followed by Pau Gasol’s five and Jimmy Butler’s four. It was a collective effort of carelessness. It’s why the Bulls are still waiting to put the Bucks away, playing on Monday at the United Center rather than enjoying a much-needed week of recovery.
“We beat ourselves,” Thibodeau said. “It's really that simple. You turn the ball over like we did, 26 times, we're going to have to be a lot stronger with the ball. They're coming through us, we've got to hold our ground, got to hold our space. We've got to tuck it on the catch. Got to run through the pass. Got to stop dancing with the ball.”
The sloppiness on display Saturday has been absent for most of the series, which has seen the Bulls locked-in at both ends against a worse team. But Game 4 was an ugly reminder that there’s no room for error in the playoffs, and that margin is only going to grow thinner as the opponents get tougher deeper into the postseason.
The Bucks aren’t a serious threat to upset the Bulls in the first round—they simply don’t have the offensive weapons, and even as sloppy as the Bulls played on Saturday, Chicago lost on a last-second Jerryd Bayless layup. But if the sixth-worst offense in the league scored 39 points off turnovers against the Bulls, a couple of games like that against a team that features LeBron James and Kyrie Irving in the next round could cost them their title hopes.
A lot has gone right for the Bulls since the start of the playoffs. Rose looks like himself again after an inconsistent, injury-plagued regular season, and Butler is playing out of his mind. But there are still lessons to learn, things that need to be tightened up before the all-but-preordained second-round matchup with the Cleveland Cavaliers that could determine who’s still playing in June.
It’s better that the Bulls are learning this lesson now than when it’s time to play another contender. The Cavs’ 20th-ranked defense is a far cry from the stifling, suffocating mass of limbs that has been all over the passing lanes for the Bucks.
“I think the biggest thing was their intensity,” Thibodeau said. “Their ball pressure, they're very active with their hands. They'll pop the ball loose, and when you're aggressive like that, if you're making somebody react to you, you have an advantage. You're going to have to make the right play. When we did, we got great shots. And when we didn't, we had problems.”
The Bulls’ turnover troubles are easier to mask when they come against a team with the league’s sixth-worst offense. Cleveland is going to make Chicago work harder on the defensive end to stay in games. The Cavs have three of the most dangerous offensive players on the planet. A high-turnover game in this series against Milwaukee can be a teaching moment, a bump in the road on the way to an inevitable first-round win.
It won’t be a brush-it-off-and-move-on moment if they do it in Cleveland.
“We were letting them be the aggressor,” said Gasol after the game. “They had the initiative, they put us on our heels a little bit. We need to do a better job of standing our ground and protecting the ball and making them pay for that aggressiveness. We made runs, we kept it close, we had a chance at the end. But it wasn’t good enough.”
The Bulls have a chance to put the Bucks away on Monday on their home court. The second round doesn’t start until next weekend. The Bulls need that time to recover from what has been a physical, unrelenting first-round battle. Joakim Noah is visibly banged-up, and Nikola Mirotic played Saturday after missing Thursday’s Game 3 with a left leg injury.
A five-game series win will still give them plenty of time to rest up and get healthy. But they could have had even longer to prepare for the most important series of all, if they had only stayed out of their own way.
Sean Highkin covers the Chicago Bulls for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @highkin
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