DeMar DeRozan on Wednesday scored a career playoff-high 41 points as the Chicago Bulls outlasted Milwaukee 114-110 in Game 2 of their Eastern Conference series, altering his team’s painful recent history against the Bucks and giving the matchup a fresh start.
Now it is the defending champions who are suddenly hurting as the teams head to Chicago with the score 1-1.
Nikola Vucevic added 24 points and 13 rebounds, while Zach LaVine had 20 points as the sixth-seeded Bulls beat the third-seeded Bucks for just the second time in their past 19 meetings.
Photo: AP
“No matter what you did in the regular season, this is a brand new start and new mindset,” DeRozan said. “You could see it in all the guys. It doesn’t matter if we’d lost 20 times to those guys. This is an opportunity for us to compete. We’ve got to take advantage of it.”
The big question now is what shape the Bucks will be in when their series resumes today.
Bobby Portis left the game with an abrasion to his right eye after the first quarter and Khris Middleton exited with 6 minutes, 49 seconds remaining after his left leg gave out while he tried to plant on a spin move.
Photo: AFP
Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer said after the game that Middleton has a sprained medial collateral ligament and was to undergo an MRI.
“He’s always been positive, and he knows the type of team that we are and how resilient we are,” Bucks guard Jrue Holiday said. “We just want him to get back as quickly as possible and be healthy, so he can come out here and help us win games.”
Budenholzer said that Portis “should be fine with some time.”
Giannis Antetokounmpo led the Bucks with 33 points, 18 rebounds and nine assists, putting him one assist from his second career playoff triple-double.
Antetokounmpo increased his career post-season point total to 1,715 to overtake Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1,692) for the most in Bucks history.
Brook Lopez had 25 points for the Bucks, while Middleton scored 18 and Holiday got 15.
DeRozan scored eight points during a 13-0 run that began late in the third quarter and gave the Bulls a 96-80 lead with 9:47 remaining.
The Bulls still led by 15 before Milwaukee rallied.
Lopez converted a three-point play to cut Chicago’s lead to 112-109 with 56 seconds left.
“We expected those guys to make a run,” Vucevic said. “They’re a championship team for a reason. They’ve been there before, so we expected them to make a run.”
However, after Alex Caruso and Vucevic got offensive rebounds on the Bulls’ ensuing possession, DeRozan’s driving layup made it 114-109 with 18.2 seconds left.
Chicago bounced back from a 93-86 Game 1 loss and continued to show the grit that had been missing late in the regular season, particularly when facing top teams.
The Bulls lost 15 of their final 22 regular-season games.
During the regular season, the Bulls went just 2-21 against the top four seeds in each conference.
“I do think that playing some of these higher-level teams at the end of the year has maybe kind of hardened us, helped us grow,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said. “It’s helped us get better. It’s helped us be able to have that kind of mentality that we’ve got to move on to the next play. I think at times this year when we played against good teams, when it started to go a little bit the other direction, we didn’t have enough in us to get it back going in our direction.”
Elsewhere in the Eastern Conference, Joel Embiid sank a turnaround three-pointer with 0.8 seconds to play in overtime as the visiting Philadelphia 76ers defeated the Toronto Raptors 104-101 in Game 3 of their first-round series.
Philadelphia lead the best-of-seven series 3-0 and will look to complete a sweep in Toronto tomorrow.
Jaylen Brown scored 10 fourth-quarter points as the Boston Celtics erased a 17-point deficit and rallied for a 114-107 victory over the visiting Brooklyn Nets to take a 2-0 lead in their series.
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