MILWAUKEE — The Chicago Bulls learned a lesson Friday night: Few NBA players test toughness more than Giannis Antetokounmpo.
After weeks of preaching physicality, the Bulls drove up to Milwaukee with a game plan fixated on stepping into the path of an unstoppable object. This roster wants to prove it can hit hard and fast and ask questions later. The Bulls draw charges and rotate efficiently and force opponents into poor 3-point opportunities. So far this season, that’s been enough to sit on top of the Eastern Conference.
All right. That’s all fine enough. Want to prove your team is really tough? Try this scenario.
The opposing team is led by a 6-foot-11, 242-pound forward who romps through the paint with all the grace of a ballerina en pointe. Antetokounmpo can dodge around any defender in the league. It just happens that he prefers to go through them. And this season, he’s not wasting any time getting right to the rim, averaging 32.3 points through three games.
Even worse? Antetokounmpo loves to win games that mean something. And, yes, in Milwaukee that includes the NBA Cup, a title the Bucks plan to defend this fall.
The Bulls knew the rubric for facing Antetokounmpo. Individual defense wouldn’t be enough. Slowing — not stopping — that kind of force would require deft traps and robust rotations and the endurance to withstand four quarters of bruising drives.
But in Friday’s 120-107 loss, the Bulls still failed the test.
“At some point, you’re going to have to put your nose in there against him,” coach Billy Donovan said. “He’s just a handful. I’ve got great respect for his motor, his intensity, the way he competes. But at a certain point, you’re going to have to match force with force.”
Isaac Okoro and Patrick Williams shouldered the primary assignment on Antetokounmpo during their respective defensive shifts while guards across the roster scrambled to step in for on-ball traps.
Antetokounmpo did not score a basket for the first 10 minutes, 39 seconds of the game, in part due to the defensive frenzy surrounding him. Williams stepped into Antetokounmpo’s path as he roared toward the rim in transition in the first quarter, creating enough of a deflection to force the larger forward to throw the ball away. Ayo Dosunmu forced a similar turnover in the second quarter, running up behind Antetokounmpo and poking the ball off his hip as he attempted to push a fast-break drive.
The defensive plan was complicated when Okoro picked up his third foul only 20 seconds into the third quarter, forcing Nikola Vučević to pick up rotations. Still, the Bulls managed to hold Antetokounmpo to 13 first-half points mostly by keeping him out of rhythm — and trailed by only one point as a result.
But in the second half, Antetokounmpo stopped seeing Bulls players as obstacles. Defenders morphed into bumpers on a pinball board, shiny targets to bounce his body off of in his pursuit of finding the basket. Antetokounmpo carved his path through the paint, twirled through traffic for a dunk, annihilated a dunk attempt by Jalen Smith.
When Matas Buzelis blocked a shot in the fourth quarter, Antetokounmpo tapped the ricocheting ball back over the rim in a mocking lesson on the futility of trying to slow him down. A titan, after all, can only be contained for so long.
“Sometimes I feel like he misses on purpose and grabs it and finishes because he gets you out of the way,” said Buzelis, who led the Bulls with 20 points. “To guard him, it takes a team.”
Antetokounmpo racked up 41 points and 15 rebounds by the time the final buzzer sounded. Nineteen points came in the fourth quarter — and six were scored in the final five minutes.
The Bulls now sit second in the East Group C with a win, a loss and two games left in group play. They will round out the first stage of the NBA Cup tournament by hosting the Miami Heat on Friday, then traveling to play the Charlotte Hornets on Black Friday.
Teams historically need three wins to advance to the quarterfinals of the tournament, although last year two teams — the New York Knicks and the Bucks — finished the group stage unbeaten. The Bulls also fell to a minus-7 point differential, which is the secondary tiebreaker for group-stage advancement behind head-to-head record.
Here are three takeaways from the loss.
1. 3-point shooting lags behind.
On another night, the Bulls might have been able to absorb even this outrageous performance from Antetokounmpo. But on Friday, a disparity in shooting from behind the 3-point arc kept the Bulls from fending off the Bucks’ second-half surge.
The Bulls went only 10-for-33 from 3-point range against the Bucks, who finished 16-for-39 from deep after heating up for an 8-for-16 streak in the second half. Despite matching the Bucks in almost every other scoring statistic — free throws (12-14), fast break (21-16), points in the paint (62-60) — that 18-point deficit dulled the edge of the Bulls offense.
Donovan has been content with a lower-volume 3-point output from his team this season, which has been offset by an improvement in attempts at the rim and from the free-throw line. But he acknowledged that the Bulls on Friday failed to generate enough looks at the rim or the perimeter to power their scoring.
“I didn’t think we made really good decisions,” Donovan said. “We turned it over some, but the ball movement part of it — in terms of the recognition of what was open — we just never really did a good enough job of getting them to close out and moving them around a little bit more.”
2. Jekyll-and-Hyde night from Josh Giddey.
Giddey recorded one of his most efficient first halves of the season against the Bucks, tallying 14 points and seven assists while shooting 2-for-3 from behind the arc — all without committing a turnover. Midway through the second half, he reached double-digit assists to record his seventh double-double of the season, tying Nikola Jokić and Karl-Anthony Towns as league leaders.
But Giddey lost his touch in the second half. He went 0-for-5 from the floor — including two misses from behind the arc — and turned the ball over four times against seven assists, finishing with 16 points and 14 assists. This sudden drop-off in production reflected a team-wide stagnation as the Bulls struggled to move the ball side-to-side and generate open looks at the rim.
3. Dosunmu returned from injury.
After missing two games with a quad bruise, Dosunmu returned to the lineup under a 24-minute playing-time restriction. Dosunmu came off the bench and finished with seven points, three assists and two steals in 20 minutes.
Donovan said he was encouraged by Dosunmu’s activity off the bench and believes the guard will need only two more games under the minutes restriction before being fully cleared.