Rose returns to help Chicago Bulls stop Blazers
The Chicago Bulls visited one of their least favorite places to play on Tuesday night with one of their best players back in the lineup.
Derrick Rose scored 17 points after missing the two previous games with a sprained left ankle. The Bulls squandered a 13-point lead in the fourth quarter but managed to hold off the Portland Trail Blazers 93-88 at the Moda Center.
Since the end of the championship era, the Bulls are just 3-13 in Portland, but they snapped a seven-game losing streak in Oregon.
Rose's bank jumper with 10:07 remaining gave the Bulls their biggest lead of the night at 78-65. But they went scoreless for the next five minutes as Portland used an 11-0 run to tighten things up.
Pau Gasol finally ended the drought with a 15-foot fadeaway jumper as the shot clock expired, but Blazers guard C.J. McCollum answered with a 3-pointer to make it 80-79.
On the next trip down the floor, Jimmy Butler and Portland center Mason Plumlee had to be separated after Plumlee flattened Butler while trying to fight through a screen.
Butler retaliated by tripping Plumlee before jumping to his feet and confronting the big man. After a long look at the replay, the referees called a flagrant foul on Plumlee and a technical foul on Butler.
Following the exchange of free throws, McCollum hit a pair of foul shots to tie the score at 82-82 with 4:01 remaining. Three free throws, plus a running bank by Gasol, sent the Bulls ahead by 5 points with 1:46 left. The Blazers came back with a free throw off an offensive rebound, followed by a Plumlee coast-to-coast dunk.
With 20.7 seconds on the clock, Portland's Damien Lillard missed a free throw that would have tied the score. Butler and Taj Gibson knocked down 6 straight free throws to put the game away.
Butler led the Bulls with 22 points. Nikola Mirotic added 13 points, while Gasol finished with 12 points and 14 rebounds.
Lillard had a rough night, going 4-for-21 from the field, but he managed to score 19 points. McCollum finished with 18.
The Bulls went 1-1 without Rose, beating Phoenix before losing to undefeated Golden State. They lost backup point guard Aaron Brooks to a hamstring injury in the Suns game; he's expected to be sidelined for a few weeks.
With an 8-4 record heading into Tuesday's action, Butler decided there is still room for improvement. Butler was easily the Bulls' best player on the first two games of the road trip, averaging 30 points while shooting an even 50 percent from the field.
"I don't think we bring that fight every single night," Butler told reporters in Portland. "I think we're starting to get back to that, but early on we weren't the hardest-playing team every night. We always need to and have to be the hardest-playing team.
"I just think that at times we take for granted how talented we are as a whole and with all the guys on this roster. We think we can come out and just go through the motions at the beginning of a game, dig ourselves a little hole, and think we can just pick it up at any point and time, and it just doesn't work like that."
Everything about the Bulls has been inconsistent this season. Sometimes they start slow, other times finish slow. They've beaten good teams and struggled with bad teams. Besides Butler and maybe Gasol, every player on the roster has been wildly inconsistent.
Rose has struggled through the early season, playing with a protective face mask and blurry vision in his left eye - both the result of a fractured orbital bone, suffered on the first day of practice Sept. 29.
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