Chicago Bulls are struggling to finish games as they come up short in close losses: ‘We’ve got to sharpen up some things’

Barely a month into the season, the Chicago Bulls are setting a high bar for late-game adrenaline.

Almost every game has felt as if it has gone down to the wire — and that’s for a good reason. Besides getting blown out by 32 points against the Cleveland Cavaliers in their third game, the Bulls are dropping losses by a margin of only 8.7 points — 4.8 minus without the the Cavs loss.

“Those are just toss-it-up-in-the-air games,” second-year guard Ayo Dosunmu said.

The Bulls have recorded a 1.6-point scoring margin against opponents through 13 games, a promising sign for the team’s ability to keep games close. Yet they are 6-7.

So what’s keeping the Bulls out of the win column? The key to flipping the team’s record appears to lie in the final minutes of the game, but it often starts much earlier as slow starts have plagued them.

“All those games are coming down to the wire, but a lot of it is where we’re trying to come from behind,” coach Billy Donovan said. “It hasn’t been necessarily the last possession. A lot of it’s been us trying to come from behind where we’ve been down by seven, eight points and there’s been less than five minutes to go and we’re trying to fight our way back in.”

The Bulls often feel as if they hold the ultimate weapon in the fourth quarter: late-game wizard DeMar DeRozan, who earned his nickname “King in the Fourth” years ago with his ability to clinch close games.

But DeRozan’s magic has been confined this season, especially under the pressure of double teams and traps angled to prevent him from taking shots in the fourth.

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“You can’t always ask DeMar to shoot the ball all the time,” Donovan said.

When the Bulls enter close-game situations in the fourth quarter, Donovan wants them to buck the impulse to immediately look to DeRozan. In recent games against the New Orleans Pelicans and the Toronto Raptors, Alex Caruso, Dosunmu and Nikola Vučević took the attempts at tying and go-ahead shots in the fourth quarter.

Donovan emphasized the Bulls won’t escape close games if they only rely on All-Stars DeRozan and LaVine. Even when those early/-season attempts weren’t successful, he feels they will build a pattern for future success as the Bulls learn to balance their late-game approach.

“Our guys need to be in those situations,” Donovan said, “because you get later in the season, you get against better teams and they’re going to say, ‘Listen, we’re just not gonna allow this guy to shoot.’ So the other guys have got to be in these situations where they’re asked to step up.”

Still, the Bulls need to improve their performance in clutch situations to avoid slipping further down the Eastern Conference standings. They are five games behind the Milwaukee Bucks entering Saturday as they sit seventh in the East.

With improved execution in the fourth quarter, the Bulls could be a one- or two-loss team. As they navigate the next month of the regular season, flipping the script in the final quarter will be the key to moving back up the ladder in the East.

“We’re getting the shots that we want,” Dosunmu said. “We’re getting the ball in the hands of the players who we feel give us the best chance to win games. We’ve got to sharpen up some things, but I think that us being in that situation is going to continue to help us.”