1. Losing The Rebound Battle
Robin Lopez enjoyed a near triple-double with a career night in blocks with eight, to go along with nine rebounds and 10 points, and Taj Gibson had a double-double (11 points and 10 rebounds) before fouling out at the end of a crucial 4th quarter.
That’s about the only good thing you could say about the Bulls’ activity in the paint all night. They missed billions of offensive rebounds, yielding 11 to Julius Randle alone, and 26 to Randle, old friend Luol Deng, and Larry Nance, Jr. Randle and Nance seemed to swallow up every miss in the fourth quarter, and there were plenty of those. (More on that in a second.)
Julius Randle alone tied a career high with 20 rebounds overall, contributing a third of LA’s 60 total boards on the night. Chicago had just 46. Chicago had just 14 offensive boards to the Lakers’ 42 defensive boards; a grotesque disparity that robbed a team that couldn’t buy a basket of badly-needed compensatory second-chance scoring opportunities.
Luke Walton’s Lakers, the team that was actually “younger and more athletic,” proved it down low last night.