Bulls By The Horn | Blog-a-bull
I should have known better. I looked at the past two games for the Nets against two poor teams (Kings without Evans and the Pistons) and started getting excited. “The Bulls have been ravaged by injuries, the Nets are playing well. This has to be a 3 game win-streak!” That’s what ran through my head all day today as I waited for the Nets game to come on, but obviously, that wasn’t the case last night. If I would have taken a closer look at this game, I should have known that this wasn’t going to be pretty for the Nets. This game was the back end of a home/away back-to-back, and because of it, the Nets didn’t get into Chicago until late. The Bulls on the other hand were absolutely housed in their last performance against the Heat, and you knew they were going to come out aggressive. The result was the Bulls getting out to a quick lead, extending it to 16 by half-time and not really looking back. Even though the Nets went on a 9-0 (3 Jarvis Hayes threes) run to start the second half, it just seemed like the Bulls were always in control and they won this one pulling away, 106-83.
After combining for a total of 68 points against the Pistons, Brook Lopez and Yi Jianlian only scored 14 points on 5-20 shooting. Yi started off pretty nicely, but was quickly saddled with two fouls and lost whatever rhythm he had. Lopez on the other hand, just didn’t have it tonight. He never really fought for position, allowed himself to get pushed outside, and settled for jumpers. When he did attack, he either rushed up a tough jumper or lost possession of the basketball. Usually when Brook has a rough game, it is because his teammates don’t really look for him, however tonight, this one is all on Brook. It was probably the fatigue of playing 41 minutes two nights ago and 30 minutes last night, but even when his teammates were looking for him he wasn’t really getting to his sweet spots and working for the ball. Usually you can count on Brook running the floor and working for offensive rebounds to get himself some easy baskets, but that didn’t happen against Chicago.
Terrence Williams lead the Nets in scoring against the Bulls (16), but he also had the most shot attempts (15), and he wasn’t very efficient. This tends to happen with T-Will in games like these where nobody is really taking charge. T-Will’s game is to attack the basket and find cutters for easy looks. However when the offense is stagnant, like it was last night, Terrence tends to over-dribble and over-shoot. Yes it is poor shot selection, but it isn’t the type of poor shot selection he showed in the beginning of the year where he was jacking up shots as soon as he touched the basketball. No, T-Will’s ends up forcing up lay-ups and shots at the rim and while you don’t want him forcing up shots, you have to give him credit for being one of the only aggressive guys on offense.
Some more thoughts after the jump:
- That was a vicious dunk from CDR on Joakim Noah, although Noah got his revenge. He threw one down on Brook, then a little later put one down on Kris Humphries.
- The Nets were surprisingly solid from the three point line last night, going 10-22 (45.5%). However, inside the arc was another story. They shot 19-59 from 2, which is a grand total of 32.2%.
- Things got a little chippy late, with Kris Humphries picking up a flagrant foul (bad call) after Jannero Pargo overreacted after a hard foul. CDR got T’d up after “mushing” Joe Alexander’s face. His take on it: “Apology 2 Nets fans,my fans & the Franchise for that tech but a man should NEVER say/do certain things to another MAN.Thats Y I mushed him.” I don’t know what Alexander did to him, but it must have been bad.
