For one half, the one-win Bulls were the best team in the building. The second half explained the standings.
The final score says San Antonio 124, Chicago 119, and that is the polite version. The honest version is 70–56 — what Chicago led by at halftime, at home, against the hottest team in the league — and the 20-point lead the Bulls built before that, in a second quarter when everything they touched went in. The Spurs’ 10th straight win spent two quarters looking like the trap game on their schedule. Then the second half started, and San Antonio took the game back possession by possession until there was nothing left of the best half Chicago has played all season.
The setup made the first half stranger. San Antonio arrived at 9–2, winners of nine straight, with Victor Wembanyama averaging 30.1 points a night, and the market priced it that way: the Spurs closed as 14.5-point favorites, minus-1180 on the moneyline, against a 1–8 Chicago team that had lost seven in a row. For 24 minutes, none of it mattered.
The lead was real
Chicago ran from the opening tip. The Bulls put up 41 in the first quarter, their rookie Caleb Wilson scored 15 in his 15 minutes — every one of them before halftime, on 5-of-7 shooting — and the building started to believe it was watching the night the season turned. Wilson never scored again. By then he had already done the loudest work of his young career.
Jalen Smith played the half of his life. He had 17 at the break on 6-of-7 shooting and 3-for-3 from deep, and he finished with 23 points while going a perfect 5-for-5 from three. Nic Claxton, in his second game back from the hamstring injury that cost him the season’s first eight games, scored 10 on 4-of-4 shooting in eight first-half minutes and finished with 17. When the lead peaked at 66–46 in the second quarter, Chicago was not surviving the game. Chicago was running it.
San Antonio’s stars were not quiet, which is what made the margin so jarring. De’Aaron Fox had 17 points and six assists by halftime. Wembanyama had 15 points, four rebounds, three blocks and two steals, and one of Fox’s finishes — a driving and-one through contact late in the second — cut into the lead without ever denting Chicago’s control of it. The Spurs went to the locker room down 14 with their two best players already rolling. That is not a team that has been solved. That is a team that has been delayed.
Nineteen giveaways
The comeback did not arrive as one run. It arrived as a tax Chicago kept paying. The Bulls turned the ball over 19 times; the Spurs turned it over six. San Antonio came up with 16 steals, and the third quarter turned into a layup line built out of Chicago’s mistakes: the Spurs won the quarter 34–19, Dylan Harper’s three tied the game at 73 with eight minutes left in the period, and Wembanyama’s dunk off a Fox feed in the final minute sent San Antonio to the fourth ahead 90–89. Harper, playing a team-high 36 minutes, finished with 18 points, 10 assists and four steals. The lead Chicago had spent a half building was gone in twelve minutes, and the building knew it before the scoreboard said so.
Wembanyama closed it
The fourth quarter was the formality the second half had been promising. San Antonio won it 34–30, and Wembanyama’s final line reads like the answer to the first half: 32 points on 13-of-18 shooting, nine rebounds, five blocks, in 32 minutes. Chicago kept swinging — 30 points in the fourth, the margin down to five at the end — but the Bulls never got the ball back with a chance to tie, and the favorite that had been minus-1180 needed every one of the 68 points it scored after halftime to survive the night. Chicago covered the 14.5 easily. The cover was never the prize.
Wemby helps secure the Spurs’ 10th straight win — NBA
What is left is the mirror the standings hold up. San Antonio is 10–2 with 10 straight wins, and its worst half of the month still ended in a road victory because the best player on the floor was wearing its jersey. Chicago is 1–9 with eight straight losses, and the cruelest part of Wednesday is that the Bulls finally played the game that beats San Antonio — for exactly as long as they could hold onto the ball. Smith’s perfect night from three, Wilson’s first-half burst, Claxton back and finishing everything: all of it was real, and none of it was enough, and both of those things will follow this team into the next one.
Game Center — San Antonio at Chicago · Stats Hub · NBA hub
