The small things the Bulls didn’t do
April 28th, 2009
There are small things that the Bulls didn’t do that if they did, they’d probably be up 3-1 and on their way to winning the series against the Celtics.
- Rose got lost in screens and didn’t fight enough through them. This allowed the Celtics (Ray Allen amongst them) to get open 3s.
- Gordon needed to move his feet more. He must have helped with defensive rebounding too, especially when the Celtics were killing the Bulls on the offensive glass. He also was tentative at times in getting after the ball – on more than one occasion I saw him hesitating to take a couple of steps and pick-up a loose ball only to have a Celtic player beat him to it. On another occasion on a fast break he stopped at the 3p line instead of filling the lane, and when Rose’s pass went a little bit in front of him, he tried to catch it without moving his feet and lost it out of bounds.
- Noah couldn’t keep Perkins off the offensive glass. Easier said than done, since he’s giving up a lot of pounds, but it was very frustrating to see Perkins grab offensive rebound after offensive rebound even when Noah had inside position and was boxing him out.
- Salmons wasn’t aggressive enough. Seemed that most of the time he shot the ball, he made his shots. But he hesitated to shoot it at times, even when he was open. He could also help more on defensive rebounding.
- Tyrus gets criticized for not boxing out his man all the time and not running more on offense, but what would have helped him most was if he could have finished better in traffic. He had a few dunks that he missed on which he was probably fouled, but you won’t get some of those calls against the denfending champions. Especially not on their home court.
- Hinrich kept taking bad shots off the dribble. He made some of those, but they were still bad shots. He took long 2s when he had a lot of room to penetrate and when he did penetrate he missed some easy layups.
- Brad Miller acted stupid and got silly fouls and dumb technicals. Not what you’d expect from a veteran. He also missed a bunch of passes that should have been easy to make for a passer like him. And he just fucked up a couple of FT that could have taken game 5 to a 2nd overtime.