CHICAGO — One night after he tipped in a winning shot to beat the Indiana Pacers, LeBron James sat at his locker and tried his best to say the Lakers needed to put what happened Thursday behind them.
The joy he felt in Indiana, walking off the court beating his chest in triumph and shooting his wristbands into the crowd, violently swung toward disappointment after the Lakers’ 119-117 loss on Josh Giddey’s half-court buzzer-beater in Chicago.
“This is the NBA,” he said.
No way. Not this. This isn’t normal. A win like that followed by a loss like this? Never happens.
James’ postgame words were mostly unimportant, save for taking responsibility for a defensive miscommunication that led to a three and a disastrous inbounds pass he threw after that led to another. It was his actions that said the most.
He pieced together a stat sheet that had been torn right down the middle, studying how the Bulls had made 19 threes, including 11 of 14 in the fourth quarter when they scored 44 points. Then he took the two pieces of paper and shuffled them like a stack of playing cards, one on top of the other over and over again as he tried to explain how the Lakers squandered this chance.
“We put ourselves in position to win,” James repeated.
As he finished his interview, he balled the paper up and tossed it in the garbage.
While overreacting to any loss, particularly one that ends with a player swishing a shot from 47 feet, is risky, this one punctured the Lakers’ locker room because of the hope Wednesday’s win had given them.
After losing three in a row, including two with their roster intact, the win against the Pacers seemed like a moment when the team could get some of its swagger back, an attitude built over the season’s middle months before injuries to James, Rui Hachimura, Jaxson Hayes and others happened in the most compact portion of their schedule.
Worn down emotionally and worn out physically, the Lakers felt the win was like a double shot of espresso, the energy instantly flipping.
“Sometimes your group just needs a win,” coach JJ Redick said before the loss to the Bulls.
“Devastation. It’s a hell of a way to lose a basketball game,” Redick said after the game.
The 48 minutes of basketball in between showed the wild variance the Lakers have played with recently, the team struggling to contain Chicago in the first quarter before finding its footing in the second and third, pushing the game to the edges of a blowout.
The Lakers held the Bulls to 43 points in the middle quarters before giving up 44 in the fourth, blowing an 18-point lead.
And still they had chances to win. And it sure seemed like they would.
With the Bulls within one, Austin Reaves scored on a one-footed bank shot to put the Lakers up 113-110 with 26.5 seconds left. The Lakers forced Giddey into airballing a floater on the baseline, grabbed the rebound and Reaves hit a pair of free throws to give the Lakers a five-point lead with 12.6 seconds left.
But James left Patrick Williams on the Bulls’ sideline out-of-bounds play to chase the ball, and Nikola Vucevic quickly pushed it to the corner where Williams made a three. James then badly botched the inbounds pass, softly trying to guide the ball to Reaves and leaving it for Giddey to grab. The Bulls then swung it to Coby White, who hit his fourth three of the quarter to put the Bulls up one, Chicago scoring six points in 6.5 seconds.
“Horrible turnover by myself,” James said. “Bad miscommunication play before that.”
Giddey told reporters he almost was shocked at how simple it was to cause the turnover.
“He kinda just bounced it,” Giddey said of the inbound pass. “I was surprised at how easy I was able to grab it.”
Reaves said he was trying to seal his defender, Williams, more than he was moving to the ball, allowing Giddey to go from guarding the passer to getting the steal and the assist.
However, the Lakers perfectly executed a play for Reaves to score on a layup, retaking the lead with 3.3 seconds left.
The Bulls, though, got the ball to Giddey with a little bit of a running start, and while James tried to contest the shot, it never looked off, the 47-foot dagger swishing through the basket. According to Basketball Reference, it’s the ninth-longest buzzer-beater in NBA history.
“It sucks,” Reaves said, his 30 points and potential winner not enough.
Luka Doncic had 25 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists. Hayes had 19 points and eight rebounds and James finished with 17 points, 12 assists and five rebounds.
Giddey had a triple-double with 25 points, 14 rebounds and 11 assists as the Bulls (33-40) beat the Lakers for the second time in a week. White had 26 points and nine assists.
Instead of building momentum after the Pacers win, the Lakers (44-29) again seem headed for serious reflection. They play Saturday in Memphis, a possible first-round playoff matchup, before heading into the final two weeks of the season.
“At this point of the year, you just got to forget about it, honestly,” Reaves said. “There’s so little basketball left.”
The NBA, like James said, demands you move on. But if this loss doesn’t leave a permanent scar on the Lakers, a bruise seems certain.
“You can’t go into a game on Saturday thinking about what happened on Thursday,” James said.
But how do you forget this?