The Chicago Bulls clinched a play-in tournament berth on Monday night, but it wasn't because they won. The Bulls lost at home to the Atlanta Hawks, 113-101, but a loss from the Brooklyn Nets put Chicago in the play-in tournament. Now, the team needs to focus on finishing in ninth place so they can have a home game in the tournament. After losing to the Hawks, that task become a little bit more difficult.
After the loss, the Bulls are now just .5 games up on the Hawks in the East. The difference in Monday's game was three-point shooting. Atlanta finished 19/40 from deep, and Chicago was just 7/28. The Hawks shot the ball very well, and Bulls head coach Billy Donovan knows that it will be hard to win when their opponent puts up numbers like that.
“I think some of the threes, quite honestly, were a byproduct of… there's always a battle at the point of screens offensively and defensively and I thought that really on both ends of the floors they won those battles there in a lot of ways,” Billy Donovan told the media after the game. “I think that contributed to the ball getting to where it needed to go, putting us into some rotations and some long rotations at times. They shot the ball exceptonally well, you gotta give them credit for doing that. We didn't shoot it nearly as well and certainly we didn't generate enough threes as they did because they did a really good defensively.”
The Hawks took advantage of their open looks and they took advantage of mistakes that the Bulls made. There were opportunities for the Bulls to do the same, but they didn't do as good of a job capitalizing.
Corner threes hurt the Bulls
One thing that Billy Donovan was upset about after the game was the amount of corner threes that the Hawks made in the game. He knows that they are going to happen sometimes, but he thinks that the Bulls need to clean up that area of their defense big time.
“It was pulling off the corners and being in the wrong position,” Donovan continued. “Not enough awareness on the back side. I think they were six of nine maybe, or seven of 10 from corner threes. There's no way we should be giving up corners threes, that just shouldn't happen. … Those are the ones we have to clean up. There are gonna be some times that you get into some binds, they got into some binds too. We didn't make those shots.”
This was a big game for the Eastern Conference standings, and the Bulls and Hawks will likely meet in a couple weeks in the play-in tournament. Chicago now knows what they need to clean up if they are going to find a way to win that one.
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