I was worried about this game because they were going to play Teague and more minutes to Crawford. Both are WAY better than Hinrich, and Johnson wouldn't have had the ball so much. Sucks to lose.
41 11-27 2-7 0-0 44 5-11 0-1 0-0 I'd say Teague outplayed Rose, at least considering one is the presumptive MVP and the other played 9 minutes last series.
Teague is a lot better player than people might think. When Atlanta traded away Bibby, it was to make room for Teagues, but Atlanta wasn't ready to play him full time in the middle of the playoff chase.
It wasn't Teague playing well as much as Rose not exploiting his inexperience. There is no way Rose should go through a game and not get a single FT. That wasn't Teague, that was Rose not being aggressive enough to take advantage of the situation.
Like I said, with Hinrich in there, he'd dribble pit the shot clock so Johnson and Crawford would be jacking up tough shots with the clock expiring. Meanwhile, the bulls found Boozer in the post 5 straight plays. He made two layups, hit a short jumper, missed a short jumper, and assisted on a Noah dunk. And where was Bogans when we needed a big SG to get us stops and hit some threes?
The temptation here is to say how terribly the Bulls played and how out-of-their-minds the Hawks played. This way, it's easy to convince yourself that this won't happen again. Deng played well, they got some offense out of Boozer and Rose went for 24-10. Bogans-Brewer-Deng made Johnson work for his shots and had a hand in his face on nearly all of them. Crawford made some very tough shots, but that's what he does. For me, this one was a cold and hard slap in the face. They say that a playoff series doesn't truly start until one team wins on the road. This series started way too early.
The Bulls have not really played well for most if not all of the playoffs. I agree, Johnson was hitting tough shots. The Hawks were cool under fire and just worked the Bulls. I don't think the Hawks will shoot that high from 3 again. The Bulls really need to own the boards and Derrick needs to play like the MVP of basketball. He didn't last night. 0 FTs?
Maybe all the physical play and sprained ankles are taking their toll on Rose. This is eerily like the early Jordan bulls to me. The team had some good players, and MJ scored 63 on the Celtics' greats. Even MJ couldn't do it alone - it took some pretty good teammates, especially Pip, to win I'm not seeing a Pip type complement to Rose on the team. But I'm sounding like a broken record...
