The Bulls have found a winning formula on offense
Their game against the Pelicans gave a blueprint of how they should be playing
The Bulls played their most fun game of the season on Wednesday, recording 36 assists en route to a 129-116 victory over the New Orleans Pelicans on Wednesday. Part of that outburst was due to catching fire from 3, hitting 25-of-47. It’s fair to wonder how much of their nuclear offense was based on hot shooting versus more sustainable changes. I think it’s a little bit of both.
The looks that the Bulls were getting from 3 were for the most part very good, and they were relying on ball movement to get those shots. That was a nice change from some of the previous games. Their offense, once in the top 10, had been free falling as of late. They moved back up five spots after dismantling the Pelicans (!), from 17th up to 12th.
Outside of Zach LaVine, the Bulls don’t really have anyone who can break down a defense with dribble penetration. But they do have a ton of secondary creators. These are guys that act as a sort of connective tissue. When the ball gets swung side-to-side, they can attack an off-balance defense and create further advantages for teammates, or swing it immediately to get the defense in further rotation.
The Bulls got a ton of assists in this manner on Wednesday. Players like Tomas Satoransky, Thad Young, Garrett Temple, and Denzel Valentine are great examples of these types of secondary playmakers. None of those guys are winning a footrace, but they are highly skilled in drive-and-kick actions once they already catch with an advantage.
The player that may benefit the most from this egalitarian style of offense is Coby White. The point guard experiment has been mostly a huge failure up to this point in the season. White’s numbers may look okay, but anyone who has watched these games closely can tell you that he has struggled mightily in setting his teammates up, or for that matter simply bringing the ball up against pressure.
There’s merit to continuing to bang White’s head against the wall in the hopes of development, but he is clearly not even close yet. Where he is already lethal is as a catch-and-shoot threat. He got way more of his looks off those attempts on Wednesday. The results were gorgeous. White took only four total dribbles on his 10 made field goals.
That performance is far from an anomaly. White is shooting a solid 37.8 percent on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers, and only 31.8 percent on his pull-up attempts.
The contrast in his scoring efficiency is even more stark when you break down his scoring by the number of dribbles he takes before shooting. He’s an extremely dangerous player on his zero dribble shots. As he starts to dribble, his percentages become horrific.
The Bulls would be a lot better served in the short (and probably long) term by putting White in an off-ball role. They successfully tried spreading out the playmaking responsibilities throughout the team against the Pelicans. If they want to prioritize winning games, that is the clear way to do it.
The Bulls’ best offensive action has been the LaVine-Young pick-and-roll. That allows Young to be the primary facilitator on dump-off passes, rather than having White try to initiate out of pick-and-rolls. From there, Young has been great at spraying the ball out to record hockey assists or hitting cutters for layups.
In their previous game, a loss to the Washington Wizards, I was lamenting the Bulls’ tendency to go into LaVine isolation mode to close games. They are a much better team when they focus on ball movement, and that has been reflected in the win-loss column. Eyeballing it, they usually win when they rack up assists and lose when they don’t.
This is the formula for winning games. The Bulls have already given a lot of runway to letting LaVine and White create over the past two years, and they haven’t been able to win playing that style. When they’ve let Young playmake out of pick-and-roll, set up a healthy dose of catch-and-shoot actions for White and LaVine, and focused on playing the style of pass and cut-heavy basketball that Billy Donovan and Arturas Karnisovas have asked, they have been a great offense. Let’s have some more of that, please.
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I would watch that style of Bulls basketball any day of the week and I hope we have many more Coby and Zach shows in our future! It seems like Thad Young is such a key catalyst for the movement and distributing on offense. I really hope Wendell is watching and learning while he's on the bench because it seems like the Bulls were envisioning a similar role for him going into this year and the results early on were not even close to what we're seeing now from Thad. Granted this is a great veteran with many years of experience so maybe we should give Wendell a little more time to adjust and learn in the role. I'm wondering if in time though we'll see that he does not possess the same vision similar to how the Coby to PG experiment seems to be falling short.
How do you think Lonzo Ball looked last night Stephen? Would a Lonzo for Lauri trade make sense for the Bulls?