Chicago Bulls fade in the 4th quarter of a 107-104 loss to the Miami Heat in a battle of Eastern Conference contenders: ‘Shows you how grimy and gritty you’ve got to be’

For weeks, coach Billy Donovan has emphasized that the Chicago Bulls need to win games by winning third quarters.

The Bulls won the third quarter Saturday night against the Miami Heat, using a 28-23 run to take their first lead of the night and redefine the rhythm of the game.

But that effort wasn’t enough to hold off the Heat, who won 107-104 in a back-and-forth battle for the second spot in the Eastern Conference.

DeMar DeRozan and Alex Caruso took over the game coming out of the locker room to spur the Bulls’ second-half comeback. In a 28-point night, DeRozan reignited his scoring touch in the third quarter — breaking away for a fast-break dunk, forcing his way to the foul line and going 6-for-7 from the field.

Caruso knocked down a 3-pointer to cut the Bulls’ deficit to 67-66 with 3 minutes, 43 seconds left in third, then hit a pair of free throws to give the Bulls the lead a minute later. The guard’s 22 points and full-court passing helped the Bulls stay alive as the game loosened up from end to end.

Despite this surge, the Heat suffocated the Bulls on both ends of the court by forcing mistakes. The Bulls’ 22 turnovers highlighted a slapdash night as top stars largely struggled to score. Zach LaVine went 4-from-10 from 3-point range and finished with 16 points. Nikola Vučević scored only seven points in his third game back from a COVID-19 absence. Lonzo Ball went 3-for-11 from 3-point range and scored 11 points.

Although the loss knocked the Bulls out of second place in the Eastern Conference, it offered an early test for a team already focused on the playoffs.

“That just shows you how grimy and gritty you’ve got to be when you go out there and play,” DeRozan said. “That’s a great team over there. A lot of dogs over there that’s very experienced in playoff play. That’s the type of style you’re going (to) get, that’s the type of physicality you get in the playoffs. That’s a lesson learned for us to take from.”

The Heat’s lack of turnovers posed a challenge to the Bulls offense, which averaged 20.7 points in transition this season. Turnovers don’t just fuel the Bulls’ scoring; the transition game is the central spark to the team’s energy, allowing the Bulls to set the tone on their home court and run opponents ragged. The Heat coughed up only five turnovers in the first half, forcing the Bulls to play an uncomfortable amount of half-court offense.

Meanwhile, the Bulls committed 15 turnovers in the first two quarters. Most of those were forced, but the Bulls also lacked sharpness in the start of their second of back-to-back games of the week.

The Heat forced sloppiness by blitzing DeRozan and LaVine, pressing the pair into isolation play. Physical challenges on cutting players contributed to Bulls turnovers as players struggled to maneuver the ball through the packed paint. The team slipped in and out of a full-court press, which further challenged the Bulls’ ballhandling abilities.

As the Bulls exit a grueling nine-game stretch in two weeks, a spotlight has been focused on the team’s need to hone its half-court offense.

“It’s just about trying to be be steady as a team,” Caruso said. “The execution is the big thing that we need to sharpen up on. We’re elite in transition. We’re elite defensively when we’re active, when we rebound. I don’t think we’re elite in half-court offense just yet, and that’s something we got to improve on.”

A cold start from 3-point range didn’t help the Bulls’ case. They went 5-for-17 from behind the arc in the first half and shot only 28.2% from long range on the night.

Despite an off-kilter start, the Bulls never let the Heat pull ahead by more than a handful of points. The Bulls snapped out of their first-half slump through feverish ball movement.

Caruso began flashing to the top of the paint to offer an outlet where he could pivot and quickly dump the ball off to teammates set up in the corner or slashing toward the rim. This small adjustment helped to open up the Bulls’ half-court game plan, allowing them to whip the ball around the arc to find open players, but the execution continued to plague the Bulls as the Heat switched into a zone defense.

“(We) got Alex in the middle of the floor and allowed him to play like a secondary point guard, and he really distributed pretty well,” Donovan said. “Part of the reason why we got the lead is we would get the ball into the teeth of the defense and we were putting pressure at the rim and forcing them to collapse, and the ball was getting kicked out and generating some really really good shots. We needed to do the same thing against the zone.”

The emotions of the night matched the stakes of two Eastern Conference powerhouses taking their best swings at one another. Vučević earned a technical foul for tossing his mouthguard after disagreeing with a referee in the third quarter. Heat center Dewayne Dedmon was ejected for kicking a chair pad into the stands after he fouled Derrick Jones Jr. in the fourth quarter.

The game marked the first time DeRozan and Kyle Lowry played on an NBA court together on different teams. DeRozan and Lowry developed a deep friendship during their years together with the Toronto Raptors, and the pair hugged and cut up on the court before the game.

“I can’t put it in words,” DeRozan said. “If my mom had another son, it’d be Kyle. If his mom had another son, it’d be me. That’s as simple as I can put it. That’s how close we are. That’s what it is to me.”

Guard Jimmy Butler also returned to Chicago on Saturday in the midst of one of the best runs of his career. His offensive statistics through the first quarter of the season — 23.9 points and 5.3 assists per game — match the career-high performance of his final year with the Bulls. Butler faded for large swaths of Saturday’s game, but he finished with 18 points.

Gabe Vincent scored 20 points off the bench to lead the Heat, and Lowry added 19.