UMFan83

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/basketball/bulls/ct-spt-0524-bulls-rose-offense--20110523,0,5350740.story They need to start taking some outside shots. To me, that's the key to the game and its really simple. If Miami wants to plant 5 guys in the paint, don't try and force it inside. They have shot like low 40% this series. If Luol, Boozer, Taj, DRose, etc get an open jumper 14 footer, then shoot the damn ball. Should be able to do better than the 41% you make by driving into 3 guys and getting swatted and not getting a foul call. I feel like they have been taking a lot of outside jumpers. Miami will let us do that all day because we arent a good jump shooting team. Sure we might get hot randomly (like game 1) and win because of it, but I don't think that's the solution that's gonna win us this series.

So 3/5ths of our starting rotation is on the DL, along with our starting C and CF.

Not sure how I feel about this but...tonights refs: Joe Crawford Ed Malloy Bennett Salvatore Joe Crawford was the ref who was involved in the Dirk FT fest in game 1. Salvatore is the ref who whistled that foul on Rose's 3 point attempt in Atlanta and changed his mind, and then later said he should have called a foul. If Rose is going iso a lot tonight, then he's driving a lot. If he's driving a lot, its possible he's gonna get a ton of foul calls. Crawford because that's what he does. Salvatore because he knows he fucked up. Sure that means Wade and James will be shooting just as many, but they were going to no matter what. At least that might even everything out.

I don't know how much I buy those sort of reports. If the Bulls game plan was to run a lot of iso for Rose, would they really leak that out hours before the game? It is interesting though. My impression is that he wasn't getting it to the paint a lot because he couldn't. Every time he tried, he had 3 Heat guys there waiting for him, ready to take a charge or just overall stop his movement. It will be really interesting to see what Thibs has planned to get Rose some space in the lane. One thing I was wondering is, have they been running the play where Boozer is open at the FT line on Rose drives like they did in game 6? Because that's a huge key, if we can get any of our bigs hitting 12-15 foot jumpers that changes everything. If we can get our SG to hit jumpers or create their own shots, that also changes everything. Right now the Heat can just pack the lane and dare everyone else to beat them. I can't see how that changes until our PF or SG proves they can hit open jumpers. I will be shocked and dispointed if Kurt Thomas isn't playing at least 10 minutes tonight.

That's awesome. I love that this dude is finally going to play with the team that drafted him, even if he's already been in the bigs for other teams.

I wanted OKC to win to make this a better series, but I started cheering for Dallas when they made their comeback. What a great game.

I think that's a little crazy considering LeBron is playing great defense right now, and Dirk, for all his awesomeness, has his issues on the defensive end. And offensively, Dirk has been absolutely amazing, but LeBron has quietly been pretty damn good too. Not as much as Dirk but the difference isn't enough to overcome Dirk's D

What the hell was that play Brooks? Get the ball in Durant's hands for a 30 foot contested 3?

This is unreal. It's [expletive] tied. I gotta say, Dirk has been really fun to watch in this playoffs.

Or we could get a SG that can score and play adequate defense to open everything up for Rose. But your way is good too. It totally makes sense to dismantle the team that won 62 games and had the best defense in the league all because we ran into a team that could exploit our few weaknesses in the conference finals.

I'll give Boozer credit, he was scoring when no one else could, and he did put up 26 points...but on 19 shots for a PF? 42% FG% for someone with a career 53% FG%. He missed at least 7-8 point blank right at the rim shots, and had another 3-4 flat out blocked. I'll give him credit for finding ways to score, but This 26 point effort is not the same as the efficient 26 point games he had as a jazz player when he could actually finish at the rim with some authority. Obviously people had worse games last night but people continue to hate on Boozer for a couple of reasons. 1) His defense was as usual terrible last night. There was some discussion about this on RealGM, but one of the guys correctly pointed out that the Heat are specifically running their offensive sets so Boozer has to be the help man rotating to a cutting Heat player, and have really exploited that throughout the game last night. As usual, Boozer was late to rotate or didn't rotate at all and the Bulls suffered because of it. That Bosh dunk was the most obvious example. 2) Overall he has been really really bad compared to his normal numbers in the playoffs, which has been a huge disapointment to Bulls fans. For instance, he is shooting 43% in the playoffs this year. In his career he is a 53% shooter. Boozer is supposed to the our 2nd scoring option and for a majority of the postseason he hasn't been (but did have a very nice stretch in the 2nd where we ran the offense through him and he delivered. few and far between). 3) ....I'm not sure how to say this nicely. Boozer is not a very likable person IMO. He is constantly screaming during every play, which bothers people when he's not playing well. He tries to take it hard to the basket several times, gets swatted 4 times and on the 5th attempt finally gets a lightly contested dunk and celebrates and yells at the crowd like he's the best player ever where the rest of the players are running back up the court. Little things like that and the fact that he's way underperforming are going to put him under the microscope more than someone like Noah, who fans generally like. I realize a lot of point 3 is subjective, and you can probably guess that I'm not a big fan of Boozer overall. I hope he does awesome and I hope he makes me look like a fool, but right now I don't like the player or the personality (at least on the court...seems like a real nice guy off of it). I understand and respect that some people might have a different opinion of his personality, but I am definitely not the only person that feels like that. Edit: And yes despite this, I do think people are starting to use Boozer as a scapegoat and more often than not its not really fair. I don't think there is a single loss this playoffs you can pin soley on him. But he's definitely part of the problem, even in games like last night.

This is random, but I never considered that the Mets logo came about by using the blue of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the orange NY baseball Giants NY logo. I have no idea why that never dawned on me until now, but that's pretty damn cool.

Hamilton is where Balsillie was going to move the Predators. They have an arena there that is bigger than the new one in Winnipeg, but it needed some money put into it. Winnipeg's arena only holds 15K or so. I really hope they make it work up there, if it happens. Hamilton is a fairly legit market. Toronto is only like 50 miles away, and they can certainly support another franchise, especially one that might only take a bit of the southern fanbase away. Other towns within a 2 hour drive. Brantford (Gretzky birthplace): 90,000 (23 mi) Kitchener: 200,000 - Metro 400,000 (41 mi) London: 350,000 - Metro 450,000 (78 mi...basically Chicago to Milwaukee) And then when Buffalo continues to dwindle in size in 50 years and lose their team, thats another 1.1 million within 70 miles of you. So without even including Toronto and Buffalo, that's still ~1.5 million people within a 90 minute drive of Hamilton, with 1.1 being within an hour. That would give them a larger market than Nashville, Buffalo, Carolina, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and the Winnipeg team. And that's without including the ~7 million people within 90 minutes of Hamilton in Toronto and Buffalo. Edit: And I realize this is extremely fuzzy math I'm using because I used the official metro numbers to determine all the smaller markets in the NHL, while the actual metro size of Hamilton is only 450k. But none of those markets listed have multiple populated metros within 90 miles of them that are hockey crazed and willing to make the drive to Hamilton.

Given Asik's injury and the fact that he has no offensive ability if he's not dunking (I mean the man went up and literally threw a fastball at the backboard yesterday), I am thinking Kurt Thomas gets a shot on Tuesday. I am not sure how much space he can create but it won't hurt if he comes out there and hits a couple of 12-15 foot jumpers, which he is certainly capable of doing. In fact, I think it is an absolutely no brainer that he plays even if Asik is healthy. Love me some Turkish Hammer but not in this situation.

I had the numbers at one point, but it was basically a really really hot 3 week stretch in December that made Rose's overall numbers look like an overall improvement. sometime between the 1st and 2nd rounds, I calculated his 3pt % since that hot december stretch ended, and he was hitting somewhere around 28-29% from 3 the last 60+ games he played.

This is a good post. I've noticed this as well. It's also helped that Wade has been heavily sagging off his man, daring Bogans or Brewer to beat him. He's been able to get towards the paint quickly when Rose starts to drive to slow him down. They've done a fantastic job of minimizing Rose's drives to the lane, and as such his impact offensively is dwarfed. He's almost looked confused out there at times. In the 2nd half yesterday, he took a total of 3 shots in the last 19 minutes of the game. And as far as size mattering, you have a point there as well. The only thing is, people marvel at Rose's strength for a little guy, so I was hoping that would compensate for his size issues and allow him to get into the paint on anyone. It has worked so far until this series. For the first time in awhile, I have seen teams able to really slow down Derrick Rose. I was starting to believe it wasn't possible, but here we are.

I'm sure mocking the mods will just be overlooked.

I feel like they are our big market clone. Lots of high priced aging talent. Except they have Reyes and Wright and we have Castro and....Brett Jackson? Oh and also they are broke and we are just frugal (for now).

The officials were mostly fine. I actually thought in terms of "blatently wrong calls", it was even, as there were a few plays that definitely went in favor of the Bulls and shouldn't have. In terms of borderline calls, I think the Heat got a good deal more of those calls, but what do you expect on the road against a team with 2 of the premier superstars in the league? It's something you have to accept if you are a fan of the NBA. And it really wasn't that bad tonight....the Heat used a lot more pump fakes and were able to get their guards in the paint a lot more than the Bulls. When you let LeBron get the ball in the paint, 75% of the time its going to be a shooting foul or a high percentage shot attempt. So yeah, in no way did it cost us the game.

:roll:

If this has been discussed in this thread I apologize. How much do our chances of getting Pujols depend on retaining Jim Hendry? I cant see the Cubs canning Hendry if there is still a shot at getting him. And because we probably won't get that answer until well into the offseason, its doubtful we fire him no matter how bad this season goes.

Blah....looking like a sweep

His eyes looked to be all over the place when he was walking off. I have a feeling he was concussed even though he got up right away.

lol Koyie Hill...how much worse can you be

First Bartman sighting: 6:07PM