MIAMI — The Bulls are used to getting bullied by the Miami Heat.
It has become a well-worn pattern. The Heat have a habit of physically dominating the Bulls — on the boards, on the floor, in the open court. They knocked the Bulls out of three straight play-in tournaments. After a 36-point loss to the Heat earlier in the season, guard Coby White offered a simple description of the matchup: “They whooped our asses.”
Saturday night seemed like another opportunity for the Heat to flex this physical dominance. The season had taken its toll on the Bulls, who entered having lost three straight. The game marked the third of a four-in-five marathon caused by a rescheduled home game. The Heat were at home, fresh off a win Thursday in Chicago and ready to double it on the front end of a back-to-back at the Kaseya Center.
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Josh Giddey was sidelined with a tight hamstring, a condition he is trying to prevent from spiraling into another strain. Coby White earned a night off after playing his second back-to-back of the season. Nikola Vučević was issued a rare rest requirement from the medical staff. Jalen Smith couldn’t play with a calf strain. Tally that up alongside longer-term absences for Zach Collins and Tre Jones and the Bulls were suddenly down six players in total.
But in a 125-118 win, the Bulls could rely on one buoying force: Ayo Dosunmu.
As both teams floundered around him, Dosunmu danced. He knocked down five of his six attempts from 3-point range, then stutter-stepped and sidestepped and two-stepped his way to the basket when defenders attempted to run him off the line. The guard scored 29 points, making every shot he took in the second half.
“For (Dosunmu’s) career, he’s really come out of difficult moments a lot better,” coach Billy Donovan said. “Everything that he’s doing now — that maybe he was unable to do his rookie year or his second year — you can see the work that he put in.”
The game came less easily to Matas Buzelis. The second-year forward turned the ball over seven times in the first half.
But Buzelis simply kept pushing. He squashed a transition layup by Nikola Jović against the backboard like a bug against the windshield of a car going 70 mph down the freeway. He dialed up 3-pointers whenever he found space on the perimeter. And from the bench, White encouraged him to keep pushing the pace on offense, offering a blunt piece of advice: “You’ve already turned it over seven times. What’s one more?”
In the final frame, the game finally began to click. Buzelis scored 11 of his 21 points in the fourth quarter, including a clutch 3-pointer to send the Bulls up by five points with 39.1 seconds to play. He combined with Dosunmu to score 21 of the Bulls’ 34 points in the final 12 minutes to cement the win.
“It shows the growth that I have as a player,” Buzelis, 21, said. “I’ve been working on my mentality. Every day things are going to happen and you’re just going to have to move on. I’m proud of myself, how I moved on from it (today). It was really hard for me in the game. I was turning it over so much. It was tough for me, but I kept my faith, I kept believing and I trusted my skills out there.”
The Bulls were missing three of their four centers, leaving two-way rookie Lachlan Olbrich as the last man standing in the position group. But Donovan opted not to start a center, instead selecting forward Patrick Williams and guards Dosunmu and Kevin Huerter to fill in for White, Vučević and Smith.
The Bulls spent significant stretches of the game with the 6-foot-8 Olbrich anchoring the post while Yuki Kawamura (5-8) and Jevon Carter (6-foot) marshalled the backcourt. The Bulls fell into guard-heavy rotations too often in recent years. But this season, their identity has been recalibrated around double-big lineups featuring Smith and Vučević.
Every rotation player did his best to make an impact. Carter buried a trio of 3-pointers. Kawamura knocked down a corner 3 to slow a fourth-quarter surge from the Heat and won a jump ball over Kasparas Jakučionis, tallying six points and two assists in his Bulls debut. Dalen Terry filled in with nine points and seven assists as the sixth man off the bench.
The Heat still smothered the Bulls physically in crucial areas of the court. The Bulls did not record a single offensive rebound until nearly two minutes into the fourth quarter. That rebound — a long ricochet Huerter claimed off his own 3-pointer — remained the Bulls’ only offensive board of the game.
But through a combination of hot 3-point shooting (20-for-40) and sheer follow-through, the Bulls snapped a skid to pull themselves back to one game below .500 at 24-25.