No gray area: Bulls get thumped by Bucks in playoff return
Most people thought it would take a monster game by the Greek Freak to lift Milwaukee without injured teammate Khris Middleton.
Instead, a few 3-pointers from Chicago's least favorite Buck was enough to flip the momentum in this first-round playoff series and quiet the crowd at the United Center.
Milwaukee rolled to a 111-81 victory on Friday to take a 2-1 lead in the first-round playoff series. It was the worst home playoff loss in franchise history.
"They came out, hit us in the mouth and we didn't respond the right way," Zach LaVine said. "We didn't have the same competitiveness we had the first two games in Milwaukee."
Milwaukee's Grayson Allen will likely be loudly booed by Bulls fans for the rest of his career, but he scored a playoff career-high 22 points and hit 5 of 7 shots from 3-point range to get the Bucks on track early. Allen scored just 3 points in the first two games of the series.
Earlier this season, his flagrant foul resulted in a broken wrist for Alex Caruso, which made the former Duke star less popular in Chicago than he already was.
Former Bull Bobby Portis, wearing goggles after getting hit in the eye on Wednesday, piled up 18 points and 16 rebounds. Antetokounmpo finished with a relatively quiet 18 points, 9 assists and 7 rebounds.
"That's what I've always talked about with teams that have won championships and have been through what they've been through - they know how to respond," Bulls coach Billy Donovan said. "For some of our younger guys, hopefully a good learning experience of what it means to go to another level because I thought they went to another level and we did not."
It had been five years since the Bulls' last home playoff game and the fans were juiced when the game began. Unfortunately, the Bulls delivered a rebuilding-era performance and treated the paying customers to 12 minutes of garbage time. Game 4 is Sunday afternoon.
One strategy the Bulls used when DeMar DeRozan scored 41 points in Game 2 was set screens to switch him onto Middleton or Antetokounmpo. This time, Milwaukee tried to dictate the direction off screens and refused to take the primary defender, usually Jrue Holiday, away from DeRozan.
With little room to operate, DeRozan took just 9 shots and scored 11 points. Nikola Vucevic led the Bulls with 19 points and LaVine scored 15.
"I know every game's going to be different," DeRozan said. "I'm expecting it. They tried to keep everything going to the left, starting a bigger lineup with Bobby out there, making the floor a lot more crowded, shifting over, keep us to our left hand.
"I wasn't frustrated at all. I knew they were going to make adjustments. By the time I got a feel for it, they had it rolling. Now it's on us to make our adjustments on how we're going to counter. I wasn't worried about trying to get up a bunch of shots."
Middleton, Milwaukee's second-leading scorer, went out with an MCL sprain in his left knee during the fourth quarter of Game 2 and is expected to miss the rest of the series.
The Bulls got off to a slow start offensively, hitting just 3 of their first 14 shots.
In an odd twist, all three of those baskets were 3-pointers and the Bulls didn't tally a 2-point basket until DeRozan hit a step-through layup at the 4:22 mark of the first quarter. Allen hit 3 straight 3s to send Milwaukee ahead 28-13 and the lead was never again in single digits.
"I thought we lost our way when we had a hard time scoring and making shots," Donovan said. "They obviously shot the ball better from 3 tonight. When that started happening, I thought we had way too many breakdowns on defense."
LaVine opened the third quarter with a 3-pointer to bring the Bulls within 16 points, a reasonable task for an NBA team. But Milwaukee came back with a 13-0 run to take their biggest lead at 73-44.
After a strong performance in Game 2, Patrick Williams was back to being tentative. At the end of the third quarter, Williams had no points, 2 rebounds and was 0-for-5 from the field.
There has been one playoff game in franchise history more lopsided than this one. The Bulls lost at Miami by 37 points in Game 2 of a second-round series in 2013.
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