The final NBA play-in tournament games took place on Friday night, and the Miami Heat claimed the eight seed in the East with an easy 112-91 win over the Chicago Bulls. Another mediocre season is now in the books for the Bulls, and the fan base is yet again frustrated with the lack of recent success. On Friday, it just looked like the Heat wanted it more than Chicago.
“They came out a little more desperate,” Alex Caruso said after the game, according to an article from NBA.com. “They had the mental advantage coming off a loss. Coming back home, they just came out with more aggression than us. But even then I thought we did a good job of minimizing damage. But we didn’t make a couple of shots and that was the theme of the night. Every time we needed to cut it to a two-possession game, something manageable, they’d get it to 10 and we just didn’t make the timely shots to give us that energy boost to get over the hump and they’d make a couple of plays and it would get back to 15, and it was just an uphill battle from there. We gave offensive rebounds (at the end of the third), I had a bad turnover on the baseline. We’re already down 10 points, you give those things up you get to that point in game and you have such little margin for error. We just didn’t do a good enough job setting ourselves up to win late in the game.”
If the Bulls were going to win that game, they were going to need a big day from their veteran leader, DeMar DeRozan. He led the team with 21 points, but it wasn’t close to enough. Give credit to the Heat, they had a great defensive plan going in.
“They came out and did what they were supposed to do,” DeMar DeRozan said. “Played extremely hard, played together, physical, impressive, more hungry. Came out the gate, we got it down to 10, 11 a few times and we just couldn’t pull away from there. It was tough. Missed a lot of easy shots, couldn’t find a rhythm offensively or couldn’t really get anything going. They had rhythm offensively, hit shots when they needed.”
We’ll see if the Bulls can find a way to improve next season.
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