Reserve center Terry Taylor is being welcomed with open arms the last week, coming off the bench to bring some life to Billy Donovan’s small-ball lineup.
Nam Y. Huh/AP
It’s been hunting season in Chicago the last week.
The target? A 6-foot-4 second-year player that is built like a stocky guard but chooses to moonlight as an NBA center.
And Terry Taylor welcomes all comers. But they best not miss.
“I’ve actually played it my whole life, so I’m kind of used to it,” Taylor said when asked about being an undersized center. “I’m used to people not being sure about me playing center just because of my size. But I got the heart and the will to go out there and compete against anybody.
“They’re gonna be hunting me and trying to get me to foul and make mistakes, and just trying to get me off my rocker.”
Not easy to do, as the last three opponents of the Bulls have found out.
With Nikola Vucevic (groin) sidelined for potentially at least another week and Andre Drummond putting in serious work as the now starting center, Taylor has been coming off the bench for valuable minutes in the middle as well as giving coach Billy Donovan a small-ball look that he’s been searching for this season.
In the Tuesday win over the Hawks, Taylor was a plus-4 in plus/minus, adding four points. The Bulls lost to Indiana two days later, but in overcoming a third-quarter 25-point deficit, Taylor again was on the plus side in 14 minutes of work.
Then in Saturday’s win over the 76ers, Taylor was again a plus-1, adding six points and six rebounds, while guarding the likes of 7-foot Philadelphia reserve Mo Bamba.
The method behind this madness?
First, Taylor might be undersized, but listed at 230 pounds — and that’s closer to his high school weight — good luck trying to muscle him. Second, he has guard feet, so teams trying to get him switched on a guard in pick-and-roll are finding out that it’s not quite the mismatch they were hoping for. Finally, it messes with the minds of the defense just from the standpoint of hesitating to test the mismatch.
Taylor has seen that the last three games.
“I think it just gets offenses stagnant,” Taylor said of the small-ball look. “Everybody wants to try to find the mismatch and post everybody up, and that just slows everybody down. (And) it’s a little faster lineup and whatnot.”
More importantly, Donovan has tried putting lethal small-ball lineups together since he became the Bulls coach.
He’s used Javonte Green in that look, Derrick Jones Jr., and more recently Patrick Williams. But Taylor? Few would have seen that coming.
More likely, if the casual Bulls fan would have been told that Taylor would be getting double-digit minutes off the bench a few weeks ago, the guess would have been that something had gone very wrong with the season.
In fact, things have been going very right lately.
The Bulls are 10-5 in their last 15 games, the defense is starting to become the elite unit it was last season, and now Donovan has a change-of-pace lineup to give opposing coaches something to think about.
“What I believe is not always, ‘Hey, we have to match what (the opposition is) doing,’ “ Donovan said. “Sometimes it’s good to throw the lineup out there. When you do that, and the other team is big and you’re small, or you’re big and they’re small, the ebbs and flows in the game, and in a very short time, it can change quickly. But sometimes taking the chance to do that to see what happens is not a bad thing either. And I’m not opposed to that.”
Neither is Taylor.
“I can be used anywhere,” Taylor said. “I feel like I’m just willing to help the team in any way. Whether it’s at the four, five, three, whatever it is, I’d be willing to help.”
