Bulls defense a no-show, spoiling DeMar DeRozan’s San Antonio return

Toronto raised DeMar DeRozan.

The veteran forward hasn’t been shy about discussing that.

But his three seasons with the San Antonio Spurs picked him up from a low point, and then perfected him.

“You kind of get knocked down from being traded from the situation you thought you wanted to be in for your whole career,” DeRozan said of the move that snatched him away from the only franchise he knew to join the Spurs prior to the 2018-19 season. “You kind of have to start over in every type of way.

“I just stayed locked in and tried to figure out how could I continue to get better, be better, be better, be better … it got me to this point.”

And the Bulls have been very thankful for that.

On Friday, however, even with DeRozan scoring 32 points just 24 hours after being named a starter for the Eastern Conference All-Star Team, the same team that dusted him off simply dusted him.

Despite the Bulls (30-18) putting up 122 points and getting a combined 62 total points from DeRozan and Zach LaVine, the Spurs put on a pick-and-roll clinic down the stretch, outlasting the visiting team 131-122.

The culprits were obvious, as the Bulls struggled with on-the-ball defense the entire game, and offered up very little help slowing down the pick-and-roll.

“We didn’t make it hard enough on them,” DeRozan said of the defensive breakdowns. “We didn’t do our job, we didn’t do a great job of helping each other. We never knocked their rhythm off. You can’t give up 131 points … that’s unacceptable.”

Coach Billy Donovan was in full agreement.

“I thought we had a really, really hard time controlling the ball,” Donovan said. “The initial thrust, you’ve got to be able to contain the ball, and we just didn’t do a good enough job defensively.”

It wasn’t like Donovan was playing the blame game and singling players out, either. He thought collectively as a group the defense was poor, and if the Bulls want to stay near the top of the Eastern Conference it had better be a quick fix.

What was really unfortunate was the night setup perfectly for DeRozan to return to San Antonio and show his former organization how much they taught him before he went to the Bulls last offseason in a sign-and-trade, and in the first half it looked like he would do just that.

DeRozan went into the halftime locker room with a game-high 17 points, doing most of the heavy lifting for the Bulls, who shot a ridiculous 63.6% from the field, and turned the ball over only twice. What they didn’t do, however, was lose the Spurs.

As efficient as the Bulls offense was, the defense was a mess, and would only get messier in the third quarter. The Spurs just wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t quit, outscoring Bulls 35-23 in the third to take control of the game.

Control they never relinquished.

DeRozan gave the Bulls some life with a three-pointer that cut the deficit to four with 1:06 left, but Jakob Poeltl flipped in an 11-footer off, guess what? A poorly defended pick-and-roll.

The loss ended a two-game winning streak for the Bulls, but again showed them that life without an injured Alex Caruso (wrist surgery) and Lonzo Ball (knee surgery) isn’t that easy.

“Terrible,” LaVine said of the defensive showing. “Couldn’t stop in any coverage or in any scheme that we had. It didn’t matter what we were in we just couldn’t stop the ball. We gotta figure out how to stop having teams score so much. We gave up 130 … it’s just going to be hard to win any game that way, so we just gotta do better. That is unacceptable.”

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