CLEVELAND — It wasn’t exactly Bulls guard Josh Giddey’s finest moment.
‘‘It’s not a good highlight reel to be on,’’ Giddey joked after the Bulls’ six-point loss Saturday to the Cavaliers.
With just more than six minutes left in the third quarter and the Cavaliers making a push, Giddey found himself defending forward De’Andre Hunter. Hunter dribbled between his legs several times before making a killer crossover from left to right and heading to the rim for a nasty two-handed dunk.
Giddey, meanwhile, was left falling to the court.
‘‘I went to plant and was kind of on my tippy-toes, so it’s kind of a weak point of your ankle,’’ Giddey said of the moment. ‘‘As he made a crossover, I was up on my tippy-toes and tried to change direction. My ankle rolled a little bit. Good move by him.’’
That wasn’t the only good move made by the Cavaliers, who overcame a 19-point deficit by picking up the Bulls full-court and disrupting the run-and-gun offense head coach Billy Donovan’s team relies on. It also was the second consecutive game — both losses — in which the opposing team outrebounded the Bulls in the fourth quarter.
So is that a blueprint opponents can use to beat the Bulls? Maybe. Either way, however, those things have to be cleaned up soon.
‘‘I think they started picking up full-court, which kind of took our pace away a little bit,’’ Giddey said. ‘‘We didn’t get to our spacing quick enough. We’re running offense with 13, 14 seconds left on the [24-second shot] clock, which is hard to do. We got into our offense late.
‘‘You don’t completely turn the page. You address what we did wrong, and the fourth-quarter execution wasn’t where it needed to be. You give credit to Cleveland [and] Milwaukee, but both games we put ourselves into position to win. Just the last few minutes of the night we didn’t get it done.’’
Which again leads to the bigger issue of the composition of the Bulls’ roster. Sure, the Bulls have looked great against younger players on the rise, such as the Pistons’ Cade Cunningham and the Magic’s Paolo Banchero, but it has been a different story against the NBA’s truly elite teams.
The Bulls might have depth and a very good team, but they don’t have the star power some franchises can flex, and it’s showing up late in games.
The Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Cavaliers’ Donovan Mitchell were reminders of that. Even in the Bulls’ come-from-behind victory last week against the 76ers, Tyrese Maxey scored 39 points against them. But they were able to control Maxey in the fourth quarter, which wasn’t the case with Antetokounmpo and Mitchell, who combined for 32 points in the fourth.
‘‘When Giannis gets the ball, teams are running at him to get the ball out of his hands,’’ Donovan said. ‘‘Teams aren’t doing that to us. They’re not going to run just to get the ball out of a certain guy’s hands. We’re going to have to create on our own that kind of help.’’
And that issue is not going away unless the Bulls’ front office has a really big surprise around the trade deadline in February.
‘‘It’s kind of cost us the last two [games], and we’ve got to figure it out,’’ Giddey said. ‘‘We don’t have that kind of go-to guy, where we’re throwing him the ball and letting him go iso [isolation]. We have to do it collectively.’’
The Bulls host the Spurs on Monday. That means Victor Wembanyama is in town — all 7-4 of him.
‘‘Same thing is coming, and we’ve got to be ready,’’ Giddey said.
