BULLS ENJOY AN EASY NIGHT
Wizards don’t put up much of a fight in laugher at the UC
The NBA logo is on the right side of the shorts.
It’s small, but still it’s Hall of Famer Jerry West.
It was the only actual proof that the Wizards were in fact a real NBA team on Saturday night.
It wasn’t the roster; that’s for sure. Castoffs from other organizations scooped out of the dumpster before pickup day. It wasn’t the coaching, especially with the lack of motivation and effort Washington displayed.
Nope, it was just the shorts, and the Bulls enjoyed kicking those up and down the United Center floor in their 127-98 victory.
In what was one of the more one-sided wins of the season, the Bulls (33-35) finally treated an 11-win team exactly how it should be treated, jumping on the Wizards from tipoff to final horn.
And the beneficiary of Washington’s lackluster play was Chicago’s own Ayo Dosunmu, who scored a career-high 34 points and added nine assists.
“That was great; he was great,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said. “I think him having the opportunity to see some of those things against the Clippers [last week], him staying aggressive will tell him what to do next. I still think there’s a lot of room [to get better at scoring]. He’s worked on that. He’ll get better, as well. The one thing I admire about him is he works to get better.”
Just how badly did the Bulls bully the Wizards? With just under five minutes left, Nikola Vucevic was having words with Eugene Omoruyi. The next time down the floor, not only did the Bulls big man take the seldomheard-of Omoruyi to the rim with a stepthrough lay-in, but after he drew the foul on the play, he even bent down and flashed the “too small” gesture to Omoruyi.
Tempers never escalated beyond that, but for Vucevic — who only lashes out at referees, mostly in Serbian — to have words with another player showed just how the Bulls were feeling about themselves on the evening.
“Something was said [by Omoruyi],” Donovan said of the exchange.
It was a B-word, Vucevic said, and it didn’t sit well with him.
“You’ve got to watch what you say and how you talk to people,” Vucevic said of the run-in.
Either way, it obviously motivated Vucevic, who had 29 points and 13 rebounds.
The good news is the Bulls still have two more games with the Wizards.
If there was one aspect of the game to be critical about, it was the way the Bulls finished the last five minutes. But that was Donovan just being picky.
Because of the big lead, Donovan was able to take a bit of the workload off DeMar DeRozan. He played 35 minutes, scored 13 points and took only seven shots.
Every Bull finished on the plus side with five players scoring in double figures.
Donovan, of course, wasn’t completely satisfied, but it was as close as he could get, considering it was only the second time this season that the Bulls beat an opponent by more than 20 points.
“I wish we could have closed a little bit better,” Donovan said. “Overall, I thought our guys concentrated and focused. When you can get a chance to [win by this margin], it’s a good thing.”