CHICAGO - The Chicago Bulls finally got the kind of night they’d been chasing, and they had to survive plenty to get it.
On Friday, Chicago outlasted the Atlanta Hawks 125-117 in overtime for just its second win of the season and its first in front of the United Center crowd. It was the Bulls’ most complete effort in recent memory, even with 24 turnovers still hanging over the box score. The difference was that they paired those mistakes with 34 assists and, for once, didn’t fold when the game tightened.
“Extremely important,” Tiago Splitter said of snapping the losing streak. “We’ve been playing against really good teams.
Of course, we lost a couple of those bad, but we had good moments throughout those games. But I think we deserve this win.
We’ve been fighting for this ... we knew this. We knew we were going to go through a tough patch, but the guys really deserve this win.”
Chicago set the tone early with shot-making that matched the pace Atlanta wanted to play. The Bulls opened with an airball and a turnover, but quickly settled in with a Josh Giddey and-one and an Issac Okoro floating bank shot.
From there, the ball started popping. Chicago kept attacking the paint and then kicking out to shooters, and the three-point barrage followed.
The Bulls took 15 of their first 23 shots from beyond the arc and made six of them. Against a Hawks team that came in shooting the fourth-most threes per game and hitting them at a league-average clip, that kind of efficiency mattered. It helped Chicago seize control early and carry that edge into halftime.
By the break, five Bulls had at least two made threes, including a perfect 2-for-2 night from Isaac Okoro. His activity on both ends stood out, and Splitter had already pointed before the game to how much Okoro’s on-ball defense and off-ball movement have meant to the starting group over the last few games.
That shooting never really cooled off. Chicago finished 20-for-50 from deep and ended up plus-36 from behind the arc, the kind of edge that usually makes winning a lot easier.
Splitter also had to keep adjusting on the fly. With Caleb Wilson sidelined and his 17 field goal attempts per game unavailable, the coach changed things up again. Isaac Okoro stayed in the starting five, which pushed Matas Buzelis to the four and kept Josh Giddey, Norman Powell, and Jalen Smith in their usual spots.
Then came another wrinkle: Buddy Hield returned after back-to-back DNP-CDs and joined Patrick Williams and Nic Claxton as part of a revamped second unit. Noa Essengue and Tre Jones rounded out Splitter’s 10-man first-quarter rotation.
The bench didn’t exactly light it up. That group was outscored 24-15 early and coughed it up four times.
Still, Patrick Williams gave Chicago something useful again, continuing a strong stretch with a pair of threes and some early rebounding. If he keeps producing like that, there should be more minutes waiting while Wilson is out.
Of course, the Bulls still found a way to make life difficult on themselves. The third quarter turned messy in a hurry, even though Chicago shot 50.0 percent from the field. The Hawks took advantage of sloppy ball-handling, winning the fastbreak battle 15-0 in the period alone.
Tre Jones lost the ball in mid-air. Patrick Williams stepped on the baseline.
Josh Giddey picked up a technical after a turnover out of bounds, and Chicago even challenged that call, only to have it upheld. The frustration was obvious, and Atlanta kept chipping away until a double-digit Bulls lead had shrunk to 84-83 entering the fourth.
This time, though, Chicago didn’t let the game slip away. The Bulls answered with timely baskets from Patrick Williams, Jalen Smith, and Isaac Okoro to keep the Hawks at a distance. The fourth quarter still had its share of back-and-forth possessions, but Chicago looked steadier than it had in similar spots earlier this season.
“Just staying in the game, the resilience of it,” Tiago Splitter said after the game. “We kind of had those situations before where we had a lead and they came back and won the game.
Just have to have the energy to be there and finish a game in the end. Kudos to them.
Great effort by them.”
The closing minutes of regulation still got messy. Norman Powell forced the issue on a few late possessions with the score tied, settling for tough contested looks before his final shot to win it in regulation rolled off the rim.
But Powell also showed why Chicago brought him in. Once overtime began, he scored eight of the Bulls’ first 10 points and gave the team the steadying hand it needed. That was the veteran response Chicago had been missing, and it helped turn a tense finish into a much-needed win.
“We’re a really young team. There are going to be ebbs and flows in a season.
But we just got to stay the course, stay connected, believing in how we want to play, believing in one another ... We got to put together complete games, and this game right here, the 48 minutes and 5 minutes of OT, really shows us what it’s going to take.”
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