Undermanned Bulls put up a valiant fight in two-point loss to Boston

Alfonzo McKinnie would not have been Billy Donovan’s first choice to play the starting four a few weeks ago.

Ayo Dosunmu and Coby White weren’t the ideal starting backcourt for a first-place team.

Newly-signed Malcolm Hill wasn’t supposed to be a rotation player.

And yet Donovan was embracing it all on Saturday.

“I don’t like to see any of these guys sit out or I don’t like to see any of these guys deal with Covid, so when I say this I say this from a competitive standpoint: I like when stuff like this happens,” the Bulls coach insisted of his undermanned team. “Because to me you find out what you’re all about and where your mettle is. You want to be able to walk off that court and know that you competed at a level and controlled the things that you can control.

“For me as a coach to dwell on the fact that we have guys out, I’m hopeful this will make us better. It will harden us, it will make us mentally and physically tougher, and I think that for any team that really, really wants to win, I think you have to deal with suffering. How you deal with the suffering is really critical. Do you pout, do you feel sorry for yourself, do you not get up off the mat, do you not fight?”

Fight the Bulls did, coming up just short in the 114-112 loss to the Celtics.

The team left for Boston Friday night knowing they would be without Zach LaVine (left knee) on this current two-game road trip, and then Donovan woke up on Saturday to find out that he would also be without Lonzo Ball.

“He’s got soreness in his knee joint right now,” Donovan said of Ball. “He’s dealt with that over a period of time.”

That meant his starting backcourt was out, to go along with the fact that his starting four was still a game of musical chairs.

An easy night even for the underachieving Celtics, right?

Dosunmu and White had different ideas, as the two combined for 40 points, including Dosunmu’s first career 20-point game – he finished with 21 and 10 assists.

It didn’t hurt that the Bulls (27-14) did have two All-Stars still up and running, as Nikola Vucevic had one of his better performances of the season on a night his team needed it (27 points), and DeMar DeRozan was solid, despite a 7-for-20 shooting night.

Both veterans would get a chance to play hero late.

Boston cut the lead to two with 1:06 left, and after a lost possession, Robert Williams III drew the foul with 31 seconds left and made both. DeRozan missed the go-ahead basket, and Vucevic drew the loose-ball foul to put Williams back at the line.

He again made both, giving the Bulls the chance with 9.7 seconds left.

Vucevic had a wide-open three to win it, and then DeRozan had a chance to tie it with the offensive rebound, but both missed.

What was impressive as far as Donovan was concerned, however, was despite being under-sized and out-talented on paper, the defense that had seemingly disappeared the last month returned to its scrappy self.

“You can’t control your circumstances, but you can control your response,” Donovan said. “To me sometimes, when our response is not where it needs to be that’s where I think the habits really start to go. When it gets challenging and a little more difficult, we’ve got to handle it a lot better and rely on our habits to rebound the ball. We have to lean into the challenges that come with guys maybe being in different spots, rotations being different than they would normally be, and we’ve got to lean into that competitively.”

They just couldn’t lean enough on Saturday.

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