Coby White's 3 point shooting has unlocked his offense
the shooting isn't the only thing going right for White
Coby White continues to be on a remarkable run, leading the Bulls in this LaVine-less stretch that included taking out an injured-and-fatigued Miami team on Thursday night.
After a dreadful start to the season, Coby’s 3pt percentage is now nearly 43%, and on a ton of attempts. He’s had hot shooting stretches before, but not for this many games in a row, and what’s also different this time is it appears to have residual effects on other aspects of his game.
Against the Heat, Coby was merely 4 of 11 from distance. Which is still very good but not flukey-good like some other recent games from him. And opponents are respecting not only the number of attempts but from how far he’s extended his range.
It’s causing them to fly out to the perimeter and requiring Coby to adjust. And White has done just that. He had 11 assists to 0 turnovers in nearly 40 minutes of action. Will Gottlieb at CHGO went over every one individually.
And what I found even more impressive was several drives and finishes White had in the 2nd half. The Bulls got out to a huge lead in this game due to three-point shooting, but it was looking like at several points in the game that Miami would have a comeback completed as a result of simply overwhelming the Bulls defense. But Coby had several key baskets to keep Miami at arm’s length:
Coby has actually seen his improvement lag in the inside finishing department, and his physical traits has always historically (may not always in the future) held him back there.
The Heat, without Bam Adebayo, were a joke outfit in terms of rim protection. That needs (?) to be included in this analysis too.
But if Coby’s shooting is kept up - and man, very weird to see him grab his sore wrist after every bomb - and he’s matured as a decisionmaker for when teams guard him differently, that’s a huge breakthrough.
Other stuff from that game:
I regret to inform everyone that Vuc has won. After pouting while playing terribly to start the year, the ball goes to Vuc now, more than ever.
I hate to see it, but must acknowledge he’s played a bit better in this stretch, and especially well against the aforementioned sorely awful Heat bigs. There was a stretch to end the first half where Miami went small and just ran Vuc ragged. But to his credit when it was tried again in the second half, Vucevic made them pay, and ruined the Heat’s formula for the comeback by making their defense suffer more than their offense was running better.Alex Caruso hurt his ankle again and left the game early. In the Bulls last ten games Caruso has: left 4 of them with an injury, 3 of them he sat out entirely, and only 3 of them completed ‘healthy’. I am not so sure his trade value is as high as we want to believe, other teams can look at basketball-reference game logs too.
I think Coby's demeanor has also been pretty awesome. He's not just playing well but also playing confident and you can see him constantly going over to his peers, namely pat and ayo, and trying to hype them up. I don't want to jump on the "bag on lavine" train, but I will say that while lavine really tried to act as the bulls leader in public forums, he rarely acted like it on the court. And no, Coby isn't necessarily a leader of the team yet, but I don't really see his level of play falling off too much this from where it is now. He's making good decisions when he has the ball in his hands and he's done a great job working on both his handle and jumper where he's not a liability with the ball in his hands.
He's *drawing fouls with his hair*, folks. Prime Lebron could never.