'Mr. 94 feet' Patrick Beverley has transformed the Bulls
Two teams dumped Patrick Beverley at the trade deadline. The team who picked him up is happy they did.
Since the Bulls signed Beverley, after the Lakers traded him and the Magic waived him, the team has gone 8-4. In that 12-game stretch, they have the league's best defensive rating.
A lot of that is due to adding "Mr. 94 feet", a nickname Beverley acquired because he pressures every part of the court. It's why he's a three-time All-Defensive point guard.
With Lonzo Ball out all season, the Bulls were relying on Ayo Dosunmu as their point-of-attack defender, and Beverley is a huge upgrade.
Beverley even has his moments of offensive brilliance, like in a scoring run last week against the Heat. Chicago is also seventh in offensive rating since Beverley arrived, even though they're 24th on the season.
He's also extremely confident. After his trade to the Lakers, a reporter asked Beverley about playing with LeBron James and Anthony Davis. His response? "They're gonna be playing with me. I made the playoffs last year, they didn't. It's a difference."
Perhaps that confidence comes from making the playoffs every healthy year of his career.
Now, the Bulls are two games clear of 11th place, and only one game behind the eighth-place Hawks. Any path to the playoffs for Chicago goes through the play-in tournament, but that's how Beverley's Timberwolves made it last season, knocking out his old team, the Clippers. He wants to knock his old team out when the Bulls play two games against the Lakers soon.
With Beverley on defense, and two top scorers in Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan, the Bulls still aren't really contenders. But they are pesky, frisky, annoying — all the adjectives assigned to Beverley over his career.
And at this point, being a low seed that no one wants to play in the first round is about the best the Bulls could hope for.
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