In the end, it didn’t come down to Kyrie Irving and Derrick Rose after all. It didn’t matter that Andrew Bynum made his first start for the Cavaliers.
What doomed the Cavaliers on Monday night were two things that will cost a basketball team every night — second-chance points and turnovers.
The Chicago Bulls had 16 second-chance points and scored 29 points off 20 turnovers to run off with a 96-81 victory (box score) over the Cavs at the United Center.
“If you add those two together, that’s almost 50 percent of their points,” Cavs coach Mike Brown said as his team fell to 3-5, 0-5 on the road. “On the road versus a good team, if you give up 50 percent of your opponents points in turnovers and second-chance shots, it’s going to be hard to win.”
The first-even matchup of Irving and Rose wound up as a draw statistically, with each player scoring 16 points. Irving had 12 in the fourth quarter, but it was Rose’s team that came through down the stretch.
With the Cavs trailing, 81-76, Irving missed a 15-footer and Taj Gibson grabbed the rebound. Rose, who limped off at the end of the game with what coach Tom Thibodeau said was a minor right hamstring injury, raced down the court for a layup that pushed the Bulls lead to 83-76 with 3:39 left. Some uneven two-man action by Irving and Anderson Varejao resulted in a 24-second turnover. Mike Dunleavy made two free throws on the other end and then, after a long 3-pointer by Irving missed, Dunleavy hit a 21-footer and Chicago’s lead was back up to 87-76 with about two minutes left.
“When we hit adversity tonight, we didn’t handle it well,” Brown said. “Chicago got up in us and tried to take us out of our stuff. A four-point game, six-point game we hit some adverse situations and it was tough for us to handle. Mentally we didn’t do a good job. Physically I didn’t think we did a good job trying to execute stuff.”
But Brown thought Bynum played well. He finished with season highs in minutes (21), points (11) and rebounds (6).
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