January 15, 2016
Before the overtime period began, Ish Smith and Jimmy Butler were all smiles at center court. Laughing, they both shared the same sentiment: This is fun.
They weren’t lying.
“He said ‘I like this, Ish’ and I was like, ‘I enjoy it, too,’” Smith said after the game. “As a team, we were just kind of trading blows. He was hitting some big shots and our team was hitting some big shots and he was like, ‘I like this man, this is fun.’”
The Chicago Bulls needed an extra five minutes to defeat the Philadelphia 76ers 115-111, and Butler’s performance will deservedly become a national story. His final line: 53 points (15-30 FG, 21-25 FT), 10 rebounds, 6 assists, and 3 steals. The Bulls had a guy in the Nineties who would single-handedly will them to victory in games where it didn’t look like they had a chance, and that is precisely what the 26-year-old swingman did on this random January night in Philly.
Smith didn’t play at anywhere near Butler’s level — He was a team-worst minus-25 and took 25 shots for his 24 points — but what he did down the stretch shouldn’t be forgotten. Specifically, he was up to the task of matching Butler shot for shot.
In the last 6:30 of the fourth quarter, Smith scored nine points to combat seven from Butler. The lightning quick point guard sent the Wells Fargo Center crowd into a frenzy when he tied the game at 104 late with a deep three:
Were the Sixers’ late possessions pretty? Nope. Should Smith dribbling around the perimeter and launching a contested jumper be considered good offense? Certainly not. Would it have been better if Jahlil Okafor (12 points, 5-11 shooting) could have taken some of the scoring pressure off him? Definitely. But hey, that’s how it goes with these Sixers sometimes. Nothing ever comes easy.
“I give Chicago credit,” Brett Brown said. “They really did a good job of getting into some passing lanes, taking away our first looks, and pushing us out of [our offense].”
By the way, Smith is taking a crazy amount of shots late in games. It’s clearly his show for the entire game, but it’s really “The Ish Show” down the stretch. Here is what Okafor and Smith’s usage look like per quarter since December 26th:
| Ish Smith | Jahlil Okafor | |
| 1st Quarter | 24.4 | 24.2 |
| 2nd Quarter | 26.9 | 34.0 |
| 3rd Quarter | 28.8 | 27.6 |
| 4th Quarter | 42.9 | 20.4 |
Back to Butler for a second. If his effort wasn’t already heroic, he did all of this while playing 49 minutes on a bad ankle. Tom Thibodeau would approve Fred Hoiberg’s minutes distribution.
Hoiberg on Butler: "As good of a performance as I've seen."
— Nick Friedell (@NickFriedell) January 15, 2016
I’ll have to re-watch the game, but live it looked as if the Bulls hurt the Sixers when Nik Stauskas was guarding Butler after the Sixers switched Chicago’s 2-3 pick-and-rolls. And as the game got into super-crunch time, the Sixers started to double Butler with far more frequency.
“You go gut feel and I think the philosophical thing at the end of the game, we have an ‘Anybody but [Butler]’ rule,” Brown said. “And so we did what we did. We double-teamed him, almost got a steal. I think changing our pick-and-rolls, trying to keep JaKarr [Sampson] matched up… we made the adjustment and Moore punished us badly.”
Moore, as in E'Twaun Moore, who scored eight huge points at the end of regulation and overtime, including a critical three that Butler assisted on. The Sixers forced players other than Butler to beat them at the end, and the Bulls were up to the task.
At the risk of burying the lede, the Sixers blew a 24-point lead in this game. They came out of the gates on fire, and by the time Montell Jordan stepped onto the floor at halftime, they looked well on their way to their fifth win of the season. In particular, the slumping Robert Covington resembled the 2014-15 version of himself with 25 points on 8-16 shooting. This is a game that they should have won, and the Bulls stole it.
This was primarily for two reasons. We already touched on Butler’s huge night, but Chicago also destroyed the Sixers on the defensive glass. By my rough math, the Sixers only rebounded 48.9 percent of the Bulls’ misses. That simply isn’t coming close to to getting the job done.
Despite the difficult loss, Brown said he was pleased with his team’s effort. What did he want his players to take away from the game?
“The fact that they’re getting better, the fact that they’re competing with the best teams in the East.”
Follow Rich on Twitter: @rich_hofmann
