NEW YORK — It was the official halfway point of the season for the Bulls.
Forty-one more games to try to turn the season around or 41 more games to head to Miami for the annual play-in disaster, take the humiliation on the chin like a champ, then start rolling out the usual offseason false promises to the media?
If this game was any indication, bet on the latter.
For the second time this season, the Bulls watched the up-and-coming Nets, made up of a handful of rookies, outlast them and outclass them 112-109 at the Barclays Center.
The Bulls had overcome a 20-point deficit in the fourth quarter and actually grabbed the lead on a layup by Tre Jones with 11.4 seconds left.
Michael Porter Jr. had the last laugh, however, scoring on a layup of his own to put the Nets up by a point.
No worries. Bulls coach Billy Donovan is a wizard with inbound plays and had Mr. Game-Winner — Nikola Vucevic — ready and willing. But Vucevic appeared to be mauled, and the play couldn’t develop. The Bulls had to call a second timeout.
“I just felt like [Nic Claxton] was holding me off and grabbing my jersey,” Vucevic said. “He didn’t really allow me to move much, but that time of the game, it has to be something really significant for them to make the call.”
Donovan went back to the drawing board, this time with Jones inbounding. The result wasn’t good. Rookie Drake Powell tipped the inbound pass and grabbed the loose ball for the steal. Noah Clowney ended up getting fouled and iced the game at the free-throw line.
The Bulls dropped to 19-22 for the third time in the last four years.
“It’s hard to judge,” Vucevic said. “We’ve had a lot of injuries, but I guess we’re kind of the same as we’ve been the last four years, kind of the same situation. There are some things we could have done better, some games we dropped that we didn’t play as well.”
Put this game in that category. The Bulls’ late-round flurry was impressive, but they shouldn’t even have been in that situation.
“It’s hard when you fight back from being down 20,” Vucevic said. “You put in so much energy, then toward the end, the little plays matter. They just made that one extra play and won the game. Overall, we should have done more over the course of 48 minutes. We can’t start playing once we’re down 20. It still sucks when you lose this way.”
Not that it was a real surprise. Besides losing to the Nets twice, the Bulls also have dropped two games each to the 10-win Pelicans, the 10-win Pacers and the 15-win Hornets.
Inconsistency is the ongoing issue, but Donovan took a smaller picture of what has gone right and what’s still an issue.
“Offensively from a year ago to this year, I think we’ve been able to get downhill a lot more and play at the rim a lot more,” Donovan said. “I think that’s been good. I think our shot profile has been good in terms of the balance of trying to eliminate some of those tough non-paint twos and generating threes. I like the way we’ve moved and shared the ball.
“On the defensive side, although at times we’ve been small, we’ve been pretty good. The other part for us defensively where we need to get better is the fouling and the turnovers. Defensively, we have not been a high-turnover team. We’ve got to get better with more deflections. We’ve been OK at the rim defensively, haven’t been great.”
