Bulls get Derrick Rose back, hand Pacers (9-1) first defeat Luol Deng scored 23 points, Rose added 20 and the Chicago Bulls knocked off the NBA's last unbeaten team with a 110-94 win over the Indiana Pacers on Saturday night. Read more http://scores.espn.go.com/nba/recap?gameId=400489013
The problem with Rose at SG is he's undersized on defense. Adding an SG sized guy who has some PG skills is ideal, IMO.
His best game of the season. A shade better than Jimmy's game 5 against the Heat in the playoffs last year. Let's hope we see more 20+ games from him, as I think we'll win them all.
http://tbo.com/ap/sports/rose-bulls-end-pacers-perfection-with---in-ap_sportsf7e018f06812499999ba0eecdea48f76 A different AP recap?
http://www.csnchicago.com/bulls/ros...formance-win-over-pacers?p=ya5nbcs&ocid=yahoo The Bulls went up by as much as 33 points in the fourth quarter, but after the Pacers cut it to a 20-point deficit, Thibodeau surprisingly reinserted Rose. Actually, knowing the coach, seeing the former league MVP check back into the contest shouldn’t have shocked anybody. “Because we needed him,” Thibodeau responded, when asked for his rationale. “Nah, we talked about it before the game and talked about it at halftime. So we wanted to keep the number around 30 (minutes) and so, he was feeling good and he had a pretty good rhythm.”
I have no problem with Thibs' minutes allotment last night. No one played more than 33 minutes, and I thought by far the most intense minutes of the game happened in the fourth quarter. Indiana meant business, it was just way too late to affect the outcome. The lineup we had out there was faltering, so I thought it was fine to put the starters back in so things didn't get out of hand. It's easy for us to monday-morning quarterback these sorts of things, but I'm not losing sleep over the minute of playing time Teague, Snell, and Murphy didn't get at the end of the game.
My point was only that squandering the lead required putting Rose back in. The lead shrunk even after that. We ended up winning by 16. It looked to me like that 16 was even padded by their need to shoot early in the clock and to foul. If it was Q3 when the lead was cut to 20, Indy may have come back all the way. I had no beef with the minutes distribution. We won big.
I might have a different explanation for the run at the end of the game than you. Indiana's a very good team and over the course of 48 minutes it's probably very difficult to consistently outscore them the way we did for the first 36 minutes. If you think of the final score as the summation of the various runs each team goes on, then it's highly likely that Indiana will have at least one of its own. Never the less, I'm not complaining. It was a damn good win.
They were bricking shots early in the game that most teams make. They were even bricking free throws. At one point, they were shooting in the 20%s. Once they got in a deep hole, they clearly went away from their normal game. Imagine why Chris Copeland was +14 for them and why Hibbert played under 30 minutes. They finished at 40%, which is great for us. It's also representative of their comeback.
