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Bulls snap Warriors' home winning streak in OT thriller

Bob Stanton-USA TODAY Sports

The Golden State Warriors made good on their second chance at the end of regulation. They weren't as lucky at the end of overtime.

The Chicago Bulls snapped the Warriors' 19-game home winning streak on Tuesday with a thrilling 113-111 overtime victory. The game ... let's just say, nobody would argue with seven of these as an NBA Finals.

The Warriors looked in control early on, taking a five-point lead into halftime and going up by as many as 11 at one point. They had lost Andrew Bogut at the last second due to illness, but the Bulls were playing without both starting wings, and Golden State looked poise to take advantage.

And then the strangest thing happened: The Warriors went ice-cold from outside. The league's best 3-point shooting team with an unfathomable 39 percent mark for the season, the Warriors followed up a 9-of-20 first half from outside by failing to hit a triple in the entire second half. They didn't hit one in overtime, either, and barely got there.

Trailing by two points as the fourth wound down, Draymond Green tipped in an errant Andre Iguodala 3-point attempt to force overtime, an incredible effort between a pair of 7-footers in Joakim Noah and Pau Gasol.

Dray!

Overtime was similar to regulation in that the teams looked evenly matched, but the Bulls took a late edge on a Derrick Rose step-back.

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Rose really needed that bucket, as his play was almost historically sloppy to that point. Rose finished with 30 points but needed 33 field-goal attempts to get there and didn't register his lone assists until late in the fourth quarter. He's just the third player since 1985-86 to turn the ball over 11 times with only one assist in the process.

Rose was aided by his big men in a major way, with Noah (18 points, 15 rebounds, six assists) playing what was probably his best game of the season and Gasol (18 points, 16 rebounds, eight assists, four blocks) picking up some of the distributing slack.

Even with those outputs, the Bulls needed a little luck to close things out. After Rose's go-ahead bucket, Steve Kerr drew up a phenomenal play to free Iguodala for a bucket, but Iguodala instead drew a non-shooting foul.

That cost the Warriors some time but not the ball. This time it was Klay Thompson, who led the team with 30 points and added 10 rebounds, who got the look.

Bulls win on the Klay miss at the buzzer.

It was a tough game against a tough opponent, and the only question that can be asked is why Steph Curry didn't get one of the three clutch looks. Curry struggled with his shot Tuesday, going 9-of-23 and 2-of-9 from outside for 21 points with nine assists. His singular gravity makes him a perfect decoy in crunch time, and with ample offensive talent at the ready, Kerr opted for different but hardly arguable options.

And so ends a franchise-best winning streak but probably not much momentum at all considering 36-7 is still pretty damn good. 

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