One of the best games of the year! Complete game from all the fellas. Snell is really coming into his own out there. The guy has all the tools, IMO. Dougie will be buried further though. I thought this was Derricks best outing this season. Played his game, efficient, low turnovers, aggressive, drive first. Love it!
Although with Butler out it would have been great if both Snell and McDermott had developed into genuine NBA players, the Bulls really needed one of them to. That's 3 outstanding efforts from Snell in his last 4 games. Yessss!
The roster was designed on the assumption that one of Doug or Snell would be NBA players this season. Up until about two weeks ago it hadn't been true, and it was having big ripple effects on the team. Game to game it didn't seem like much, but not having a 2/3 off the bench that'll hold the fort down was having insidious effects on the rest of the rotation. Too much Hinrich, and overuse of Jimmy and Dunleavy. Way to go, Tony! And I agree that Tony's emergence as a rotation player probably means McDermott's meaningful minutes throughout the rest of the season will probably be 0.
Snell's PER is close to Dunleavy's at this point. Thibs will still start Dunleavy as a way to show respect to the veteran, but I think his minutes will be greatly reduced. I've been calling for playing Snell instead of Kirk all along. It finally came down to a "turf toe" injury to make it happen. I don't think Snell is going to stay this hot (he's missed only 4 shots in two games), but I do think he'll be considerably better than Kirk. With Mosgov out, they became a very short team. We were able to use our height to our advantage. A front line of Mirotic, Pau, and Noah is giant.
In any case, can we agree that this was a really fun game to watch? Lots of scoring, we ran out to a big lead and never looked back. We gave up 7 or more points to the opponent than we would have last year, but the game wasn't really in doubt. The players probably had more fun, too.
Yes, absolutely...Bulls won. It was a fairly convincing win...as regular season wins go. Very nice that we get a week to savor the win. The number of points scored doesn't matter much to me.
