Bulls Spoil DeMar DeRozan's Historic Night in Win vs Kings

The Chicago Bulls took down the Sacramento Kings 128-116 on Thursday night.

Eric Sperlazza | Mar 21, 2025

Mar 20, 2025; Sacramento, California, USA; Sacramento Kings forward DeMar DeRozan (10) takes a three-point shot against Chicago Bulls center Nikola Vucevic (9) during the second quarter at Golden 1 Center. Mandatory Credit: Ed Szczepanski-Imagn Images / Ed Szczepanski-Imagn Images

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With the extremely challenging schedule that the Sacramento Kings have coming up, they had to get a win against the 28-40 Chicago Bulls.

After a great first quarter that saw Sacramento hit 11 triples and open up a 19-point lead in the second, things started to fall apart as Sacramento went away from what was working on offense and continued a trend of allowing guards to get into the paint with little resistance.

After the Kings opened up that 19-point lead in the second, Chicago outscored Sacramento 88-57 to end the game en route to a 128-116 win. This also, unfortunately, spoiled DeMar DeRozan reaching the 25,000-point mark for his career.

Points in the paint, fast break points, assists, rebounds, and shooting percentage; Sacramento was worse than Chicago just about everywhere tonight and looked like it.

Just like they did against Cleveland last night, Sacramento allowed 60 points in the paint to their 48 and allowed the opposing team to shoot 52%+ from the field.

The difference tonight was that Sacramento lost the three-point battle and the fast-break battle.

Sacramento allowed Coby White and Tre Jones to attack whoever was under the basket at will and poor rotations allowed open three after open three for Kevin Huerter and Nikola Vucevic when the two guards weren’t scoring themselves.

Coby White seems to always play well against Sacramento and again topped the 30-point mark with 35. Former Beam Team member, Kevin Huerter, looks like he had this game circled on his calendar as he finished with 25 points on 5-9 from deep. While those two really burned the Kings, Nikola Vucevic and Tre Jones also had good nights.

Malik Monk started off on fire for Sacramento and hit 5 of his first 6 threes, but fell out of the game as time went on and didn’t take his first shot of the second half until the 1:26 mark of the third quarter.

After missing the game last night due to personal reasons, Zach Lavine was back but didn’t look like himself at all. Lavine finished with just 8 points on two made shots. Malik Monk and DeMar DeRozan took some blame for Lavine’s off night, but the starters as a whole are not setting the tone they need to.

DeMar DeRozan and Malik Monk on needing to get Zach LaVine (8 pts on 2/9) more involved:

Monk: “We can’t have that out of (LaVine). He knows that though. But that’s us. That’s our job to try to figure out how to get him more shots because we can’t have that out of him.”… pic.twitter.com/8dBUfxtzaZ
— Brenden Nunes (@BrendenNunesNBA) March 21, 2025

The starters as a whole have not been setting the tone to start games and quarters which forced them yet again to rely on their bench for a boost. As Monk says below, Sacramento relaxed after opening up a big lead and never got back in the game.

"We thought we had it and just relaxed." -Malik Monk
— James Ham (@James_HamNBA) March 21, 2025

Devin Carter struggled offensively but still had an impactful game as Sacramento’s only player with a positive plus/minus tonight.

The Kings will be taking on the Bucks, Thunder, and Celtics all at home over the next five days and will need to play much better than they did tonight if they want to get even one win against three of the best teams in the NBA.

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