Bumbling Bulls defense has no answer for Devin Booker originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
PHOENIX — Nikola Vučević demonstratively expressed his displeasure twice over blown help coverages by guards. Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan exchanged forceful opinions about another defensive miscue.
The daggers Billy Donovan glared at Ayo Dosunmu as the second-year guard walked off the floor for a timeout after yet another game plan mistake might still be doing damage.
And Devin Booker still dropped 51 points in 31 minutes on ridiculous 20-for-25 shooting in the Phoenix Suns’ 132-113 dismantling of the Chicago Bulls.
The bumbling Bulls contrasted sharply with the blissful Booker, who seemingly always plays as if he’s chill personified.
“He got too much in a rhythm,” LaVine said. “We didn’t help each other enough. A guy like that gets hot and it’s too late.”
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Donovan even trotted out Derrick Jones Jr. for a third-quarter stint after the forward didn’t play in the first half. Booker promptly greeted him with a nasty fadeaway jumper along the baseline.
The most impressive sequence came when Booker scored seven points in 30 seconds. First, Booker buried a 26-foot 3-pointer on Alex Caruso and converted the four-point play when Donovan’s challenge proved unsuccessful. Then, Booker drained a 29-footer from Tucson.
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“We threw everything at him. We trapped him. We threw a box-and-one at him. We tried to face guard him,” Donovan said. “To his credit, he had a great night.”
As for the noticeable moments when defensive breakdowns led to animated responses, Donovan absolved Vučević.
“We’ve got to be a team that protects the paint,” Donovan said. “And with a guy like Booker, you’re going to have to send two to him. A lot of times the guy that Vooch is guarding or our center is guarding, it’s going to get behind his head and our weakside needs to be pulled in. And I thought to start the game, there were a few possessions like that were our back side wasn’t pulled in enough.”
Vučević chalked his atypically animated response to merely being in the heat of the moment.
“It was early in the game and it was something we can control, little things. Against a team like Phoenix, you have to make sure you do the simple things,” Vučević said. “Some shots Booker made were tough shots. But we had a lot of mistakes at the defensive end.”
In Donovan’s eyes, Dosunmu’s came when he didn’t help out of the Bulls’ rare try at a box-and-one defense to slow Booker.
“He shot over us a lot. We put Derrick in there to try to get more length on him. We had Patrick on him, Alex on him. He really got it going,” Donovan said. “But we were in a box-and-one at that point and when he was coming off, Ayo has to recognize the guy has 40-something points. Go get him. Get the ball out of his hands.”
That’s the troubling aspect to this loss. The Suns are a good enough team — and Booker a good enough player — that you can play perfect defense and still give up a bucket. But the Bulls made gameplan mistakes, emblematic of a team that is struggling with consistency at the quarter-mark of the season.
So, yes, they own high-profile victories over the Heat, Celtics (twice) and Bucks. But this game represented two teams that looked to be in different classes.
“It’s consistently being inconsistent,” Donovan said. “We can be two different teams. We can be a team like in Utah that’s really helping each other and on a string and moving. Other times, we’re not like that. And you get a result like this.”
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