One could make a roundabout argument that Alex “Oleksiy” Len’s poor free-throw shooting in this game (four of nine) cost the Hawks the game (not to mention his dumb foul on Porter near the end of regulation). But you could also argue that Len’s timely buckets in several of the overtime periods allowed the Hawks to stay right with the Bulls until the game slipped out of their hands in the fourth overtime period. In fact, both those arguments are so convincing to me that I will throw my support behind both of them.
Doing that leaves me in an awkward position of blaming Len for the loss while attempting to deflect that blame onto teammates who failed to capitalize when Len did took on his fair share of the scoring load. I have never really cared about contradicting myself, but to contradict myself within a single video description is an unprecedented journalistic low for me. I might as well outsource my descriptions to starving Bangladeshi children and spend my time doctoring photos of NBA players to make it look like they have mistresses.
Maybe I should clear things up by just unambiguously blaming Kent Bazemore for this loss. Yeah. That’s a lot easier than blaming Len, who tied a season-high and didn’t even screw up that many possessions other than that play near the end where he intentionally kicked a rebound for no reason.