Bulls proving it's cheaper to be clutch than good

how to stay "in the hunt" through the magic of luck

Indeed, there are still some Bulls games left this season. They are teaching us very little, and that includes the opponents as I can’t even really put The Kings on any #FraudWatch after their late game meltdown ensured a Bulls comeback victory as Sacramento is already decidedly average (17th in net rating with +0.2).

The good news is that the Bulls new and more true “Big Three” of DeMar DeRozan, Coby White, and Ayo Dosunmu are playing big minutes and producing consistently. There was legitimate reason to worry that the workload was catching up to White, but his slump seems to be of the ‘mini’ variety as he bounced back with literally a career-high in Sacramento on Monday.

That included yet more baskets in clutch time, as the Bulls recovered from a second half 22-point deficit to make it another game in the NBA confines of within 5 points and 5 minutes remaining.

In those White minutes in the clutch this season, the Bulls are +87, an individual number which is 12 points better than second-place. Old friend Jason Patt has been giving this away on the dying app written about this all season. This team has not been weird at all, but very predictable:

Every Bulls game is the same…the Bulls, to their credit, basically never stop #competing, and I think they take advantage of teams taking foot off the gas and thinking games are won. These constant comebacks don’t happen without defense and opponents just totally melting down.

The degree to which the Bulls are playing over their normal performance in the clutch can’t be overstated. It has legit probably added a good 4 or 5 wins over expected.

If you broaden it out to the 4th quarter (and irrespective of margin), the Bulls are 7th in the league in net rating, yet 25th in the opening period. They are also 8th in overtime (out of 26, some teams haven’t gone to OT yet) and 2nd (out of 10) in double-OT.

In these post-statistical-revolution times, it’s now a generally accepted truism in sports (including the NBA) that clutch performance really doesn’t sustain year over year: the stats are noisy due to the small sample. For example, in these 159 minutes of action Bulls opponents in the clutch are shooting 25.2% from three and 74.1% from the line.

What’s more telling is that they are in so many clutch games in the first place. The Bulls lead the league, by a lot, in total clutch minutes, followed by similarly mid squads of the aforementioned Kings and then Warriors, Raptors, Hawks, Suns. As already stated, it is commendable that the Bulls are not truly terrible (somehow the Blazers are 7th?) to where they are getting blown out. But the better teams don’t need all these huge comebacks and clutch heroics.

So the key, with this and everything else, is what is “telling” to Arturas Karnisovas about this? Well, he’s both a moron and pathological spinning salesman, so he will very likely lean into this flukey evidence as yet another mark of his greatness. Not just in building an objectively very good team but a “gritty and resilient” one, a long-established important trait for one of the biggest markets in the league because it keeps payroll low.

Again, these clutch stats are all a bit noisy, but the Bulls are a pretty unique case in that they never change the roster or coach. So we have some compelling evidence over the past three seasons that clutch success can change randomly. Two seasons ago it was DeRozan single-handedly buoying the team record. Then last season the Bulls lost a lot of close games, and when Karnisovas was asked about this he answered genuinely: “I don’t know”.

At that time, this here blogger said: “for AK to buy so much into ‘clutch’, yet not know how to get better at it, is truly a “double-loss” of an answer.”

So I expect after the Bulls finish in 9th and win anywhere between 0 and 3 “postseason” games, AK will laud “our group” for their resilience and clutch performance, projecting that it was by design yet not really know what to do with that information except delude himself further.

What more knowing observers (literally everybody else?) can glean and project is at least we can see DeRozan is still very good but fading a bit, and Coby White remains ascending. Maybe you don’t have to totally believe in “clutch” but still can reason that Zach LaVine was so “anti-clutch” that the Bulls most impactful move was taking the ball out of his hands and into Coby’s.