How I learned to (mostly) stop worrying and (sorta) love the Play-in PatBev Bulls

Mar 22, 2023 - 2:34 PM

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Even at this season’s many depths, there was no real point where you could give up on the dream of the Bulls making the top TEN seeds in the conference. It wasn’t so much what they were doing on the floor, as the knowledge that:

1. They weren’t going to tank by holding out, say, DeRozan and Caruso
2. They had too much talent to be truly as bad as their record, and could look more like an average-to-below-average team that got some unlucky clutch bounces (just some unlucky, others were earned)
3. They just had to outlast the Pacers and Wizards

So that last one was expected: with this week seeing the Wizards lose to the Magic and the Pacers lose to the Hornets, both are now 2.5 games behind the Bulls for 10th and declared themselves unserious for play-in contention.

What was unexpected has been how outright excellent the Bulls are playing since adding Patrick Beverley off the scrap heap and onto the rotation.

Looking at every team’s last 12 games (Bulls are 8-4 with PatBev), the Bulls are 2nd in net rating (first - well ahead - is the Sixers, and we just beat ‘em!), being 7th in offense and NUMBER ONE in defense. If you’re looking to pop a balloon in that, and I do, you can throw out that outlier 50-ish point blowout of the Nets: in the last eleven games instead it’s 13th on offense and 5th in defense to put them 4th in net rating.

The Bulls are not suddenly an excellent team. They still have extremely limited shooting on the roster, no real offensive gameplan to get more of it, and have benefitted from being a bit hot from distance lately: pre-AllStarGame the Bulls were 17th in the league in 3pt% (AK said they made a lot even though they didn’t shoot many...uh, nope) and post-ASG it’s up to 5th at 38.9%.

But they do look to be pretty average-to-decent, which is a marked step up from how they were looking when they sulked into the break and were offered no support by the similarly-sulking front office.

The biggest difference is that the defense is no longer merely lucky (opponent FT% aside, they’re 2nd best in ‘free throw defense’ in last 11 games) but has sustained and actually improved with Beverley added to the rotation. There have been some easily-clamped opponents in there, but on Monday they throttled the best offense in basketball, even without Caruso.

Some of this defensive excellence is a bit of a cheat. The offense suffers because they rely so much on offensively-challenged rotation players like Caruso, Beverley, Patrick Williams (good 3-and-D guy!), Ayo Dosunmu, and the backup center du jour. And their defensive style is counter to best practices (and likely sustainability), they don’t have wing stoppers and rim protection, but instead ballhawks with the ability to fall down at the right time.

But hate aside, it works. At least in what would otherwise be the dregs of the regular season.

Does any of this matter in the long term? In terms of building the next championship contending Bulls squad? No, but that realization shouldn’t be concerning, it should be freeing.

The Bulls, big picture, are still in a bad spot, and helmed by someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, let alone a dynamic executive who can transcend ownership limitations. In fact, we can’t even give them credit for adding Beverley, as it just illustrates how much the team needed ANY credible additions these past two seasons. Plus AK outright said in-season additions were actually bad.

So it still is of constant concern that the front office looks gullible enough to treat this stretch as anything approaching validation. But they have already done and said enough to have us lose faith in any long term plan anyway.

So that hasn’t changed, so it shouldn’t remove the fun of participating in a winner take all (er...take the 7th or 8th seed) tournament to end this year, and then potentially messing with some actually-good teams in the playoffs.

And another upshot: this all has to really annoy the goober tanking-advocate subset of the fanbase.

We know how this is going to end. And it was never going to end bad enough to cause any true ramifications. But screw it, we’ve had so many March and April weeks where it was pure drudgery, being competitive (though in kind of a drudgery style of play) is a huge plus in entertainment value.