Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick spoke of his players’ “devastation” after they were on the wrong end of the most dramatic finish in the NBA this season against the Chicago Bulls.
The Lakers led by five points with 12.6 seconds remaining at United Center, where a stunning finale began with Patrick Williams and Coby White sinking back-to-back 3s for Chicago.
That put the Bulls up 116-115 with six seconds remaining, though Austin Reaves then drove for a layup that inched Los Angeles back into a one-point lead.
But Josh Giddey was the hero, sinking a buzzer-beating heave from halfway that sealed the Bulls’ fourth straight win, boosting their hopes of a push for the play-in spots.
The Lakers, meanwhile, experienced the other side of the ledger after beating the Indiana Pacers via LeBron James’ last-gasp tip-in on Wednesday.
They are just the fifth team in NBA history to win on a buzzer-beater, then lose a game in the same fashion, on consecutive days.
Asked to summarise his feelings after the loss, Redick said: “Devastation. It’s a hell of a way to lose a basketball game.
On Wednesday, James became the first player in NBA history to have three game-winning buzzer-beaters against the same team, also breaking the Pacers’ hearts in 2013 and 2018.
But one day later, the league’s all-time leading scorer was left to rue an errant pass that was stolen by Giddey in the build-up to White’s 3-pointer, which made it 116-115.
“Horrible turnover by myself,” James said. “There’s another game in two days, less than two days. That’s how you do it.
“That’s the NBA. You can’t go into a game on Saturday thinking about what happened on Thursday.”
Giddey, meanwhile, credited Chicago’s dynamic style of play for the late drama, saying: “Special moment to do it with these guys, this team.
“We’ve shown over the last month to six weeks that we can beat anybody. The way we play the game, I think it wears people down.
“We get up and down. We run. We put heat on them to get back. A lot of veteran teams don’t particularly want to get back and play in transition.
Head coach Billy Donovan said the groundwork for Chicago’s recent run was laid in preseason, telling reporters: “We’ve got to be in great shape to play this way.
“They’ve got to push themselves. I think that stemmed from before training camp started, when they all came back in September.
“They played most of their pickup games with a 14-second shot clock just to get that mentality down.
“We tried to go through training camp like that. I think there’s advantages to really trying to play in a way that forces these guys to be in great shape.
