Chicago Bulls: Antonio Blakeney breaks through, finally

For one of the few times this season, Chicago Bulls shooting guard Antonio Blakeney had a breakthrough performance with significant playing time.

What thwarted the Chicago Bulls for a long time during the 2018-19 regular season was finding the right combination to make this rotation work top-to-bottom. Confusion among a revolving door with the coaching staff along with a slew of injuries and inconsistencies on the court made for a difficult time for this Chicago Bulls rotation.

Chicago Bulls head coach Jim Boylen seems to have a better rotation in mind now. His team is rolling among a few wins that led to a nice finish to the month of February.

The result wasn’t as desired in the Windy City on March 3 at home against the Atlanta Hawks, but that’s an acceptable conclusion moving forward. As long as this young core for the Chicago Bulls keeps making progress as it has over the course of the past few months, everything is working out fine for this franchise.

There was an interesting group of players for the Chicago Bulls that rose to the occasion against the Hawks in the second leg of this home-and-home series this weekend. Some of the leading scorers and better performers for the Bulls in this game included power forward Lauri Markkanen, point guard Kris Dunn, and center Robin Lopez.

The biggest surprise among the big time contributors for the Bulls in this five-point loss to rookie point guard Trae Young and the Hawks is the former LSU Tigers shooting guard Antonio Blakeney. In a decent night for the Bulls bench scoring, Blakeney led the way with 17 points in just 20 minutes on the floor.

Blakeney shot 8-for-13 from the field and managed two rebounds and one assist. The contributions weren’t huge across the board for Blakeney, but he filled the role that Boylen and the Bulls needed him to.

Considering Blakeney spent most of this season going up and down between the G-League affiliate Windy City Bulls and the big league organization, this is an encouraging outing for him. It seems like a lot of what he needed at this point of the regular season is just some stability and regular minutes with a consistent rotation.

This is the second solid performance for Blakeney off the bench for the Bulls since the All-Star Break. Considering Blakeney only appeared in two games since the All-Star Break, that’s not a bad track record. He is definitely trending in the right direction of late.

That other appearance where Blakeney stood out was against the Memphis Grizzlies where he posted eight points on nearly 50 percent shooting from the field off the bench. Both of these games saw him post numbers well above his season averages.

A few of the other big performances that the Bulls got off the bench in the loss to the Hawks here came from point guard Ryan Arcidiacono (13 points) and declining big man Cristiano Felicio (10 points). At least Felicio was able to provide some type of solid production off the bench in this game.