Post Game Thread - vs Chicago Bulls, Home

[bobheckler]

What a great game!  If we lost it still would have been a really good game but we won so it was great!

For the most part it was a battle in a phone booth (that means something to those of us who are old enough to remember phone booths).  The biggest Bulls lead was 8 and ours was 10 and neither of those leads lasted long.  The Celtics 10 point lead only lasted :45.  This was a great test for us.  They are not a team "in transition" or "rebuilding", they are "built".  The Bulls are a team that came into this season with high expectations, a veteran team with a multiple World Champion (Gasol), an MVP (Rose) and a great, great young player in Jimmy Butler.  What's more, they're playing pretty well this season so far unlike, say, the Houston Rockets.  We just beat a quality team and we didn't catch them when they were missing key players or at the end of a long road trip.

Jeff Van Gundy is starting to grow on me.  I may need to reassess my perspective on life.  Maybe it is because he's a big Kristaps Porzingis fan.  More likely it's because Mark Jackson wasn't working with him last night, so there was no amateur idiot hour auditions where they competed for who could come up with the dumber sound bites.

1.  My game ball goes to Kelly.  Thomas scored more points but 4 of his points came in the last :28 when they were fouling him to stop the clock.  We started out the game arctic cold.  We were 3-12 with 3 TOs when Kelly came in for Sully at the 5:35 mark of the 1st, the score 15-7 Chicago.  He misses his first two and I think "oh shit, here we go again, his confidence will be shot and Brad will have to pull him".  And then he hit a 3.  Then he hit a 2 and ended up the 1st quarter with a respectable 5 points on 2-4.  With 7:35 left in the half, he was our lead scorer with 12 points in 10 minutes of play and that held up through halftime.  He got rubbed off on a pic or two but in general he played Mirotic well, which is to say he followed him ALL the way out and stayed on his shooting hand even if one might think he was too far away to shoot (Mirotic never thinks he is too far away to shoot).  In a game where we shot 41%, he was 5-11, 2-4 from 3.  It's not just his 15 points, it's when he got them.  He got us going when the Bulls defense was throttling us and we couldn't throw the ball in the Atlantic from the edge of the pier.  We ended the 1st quarter tied at 24.  Without Kelly scoring 5 of those points, and having a good 2nd quarter too, the first quarter would have ended very differently.  The Bulls were up 3 at halftime.  Imagine if Kelly had, say, 6 points at halftime instead of 12?  Even if those 6 points were earned with the same efficiency, we would have been down 9 at halftime and being in danger of even a small Chicago Bull run to start the 3rd to put us down by 12-15 and it would have been a very different game indeed.  Once again, just like in the NOP game against Anderson, he wanted the ball against last year's Rookie All-Star First Team member Nikola Mirotic.  The difference in his game, when he wants the ball and tries to work his man, is HUGE.  When he's tentative nothing works for him.

2.  Another player worthy of citation, along the same vein, was David Lee.  12 points, also on 5-11 and 6 rebounds in 18 minutes.  Playing a tough veteran team?  Bring in the veteran.  Having trouble putting the ball in the hole because the defense is swarming?  Bring in the veteran.

3.  The back court that bird shot the Pelicans 33-0 got gored by the Bulls last night.  48 of Chicago's 100 points came from their starting back court with Jimmy Butler getting a career high 36.  He really is something.  This isn't Derrick Rose's team anymore, it's Butler's.  An excellent two-way player.  He almost single handedly beat us.  He would have too except for the fact that basketball is a team sport and teams usually beat individuals.  Nevertheless, he was positively heroic last night and almost pulled it off.  Unfortunately, Bulls management was smart enough to lock him up to a longterm contract this past summer.  I would be willing to give up quite a bit to get Butler.  Rose?  I'm not convinced he's ever coming back.  Bradley and Thomas, last night, were a combined 10-30 and 2-11 from 3.  Bradley, who has been smoking hot from 3 this year, was 0-6 from there.  Well, if you're going to have an off night this shouldn't have been the one.  Better than on Friday, I suppose.  An off-night against the GSW back court, even without Thompson, would NOT be good.  Bradley's defense, usually excellent, was not that good last night neither.  Bulls were getting to the rim and getting our bigs into foul trouble because they kept blowing past him.  Thomas had zero points in the first half, zero, and only had 9 on 3-11 after 3.  That's why I gave Kelly the game ball.  Thomas scored 11 points in the 4th, but he did it on 2-4 shooting, with most of his points being given to him at the line.  Yeah, he hit his fritos and that's clutch and we need clutch too, but they were boxscore fillers.  He held off their rally, he didn't lead the charge.

4.  Pau still got it.  When nobody else could do a damn thing he was hitting his shots like it was Happy Hour.  15 boards, 5 offensive.  

5.  Noah also played an excellent game.  Not a great boxscore, but he's a glue guy.  A glue guy I'd love to have.  He does so many things well, large and small, I would be willing to stifle my gag reflex every time I watched him take a shot.  THE WORST shooting mechanics, ever.   Period.  Kids, DO NOT do this.



What's amazing is that, at a career .711 ft%, he beats the living snot out of Rondo (61%), Howard (57%) and Jordan (41%).  Just goes to show what I know. He isn't a shooter, and we know how much Brad loves his bigs to be shooters to open the floor up for cutters and movement, but Noah is one of, if not the, best passing big men in the game. Now that we have Kelly I've been inoculated against hausfrau manbuns.

6.  Turner hit his fritos and he played pretty good defense with 2 steals.  His turnovers, only 2, were so poorly timed they almost cost us the game.  His high, loose dribble is back to driving me crazy again.

7.  James Young got showcased again.  This time, though, he got schooled.  16 minutes of nothing this time.  He looks like a brand new rookie in that he still hasn't grasped the distance he should be from players to be up on him but not so close as to be blown past but not so far away they have an open shot.  Doug McBuckets lit him up repeatedly last night.  Young lost him in transition and kept going under picks, which gave McBuckets all the daylight he needed to hit his shots.  McDermott had a real good game last night and part of that is because Young was outplayed.  After giving up another fgm to McBuckets by going under a screen instead of over it and forcing the slow-footed McDermott dribble into the paint, Brad mercifully pulled Young out of the game.

8.  Sully with another beast game.  Not much scoring, he barely crept into double digits and that wasn't until the last minute or two of the game on a clutch 19'er (with an assist from Turner), but he had 16 boards again, 5 offensive.  I love it when Sully is in beast mode and we do very well when he is.  He had trouble against Gasol going over him for a few tip ins but otherwise he was a man on the boards again.  He had great focus on this game too.  He said that people were texting him on Tuesday saying "good luck on Friday, Sully" and he said he thought "I'm playing on Wednesday".  Nice.  Focus on the opponent right in front of you, not the one after.  This is one of those little things that Brad has brought to this team.  Focus.  Attention to detail.  Caring about each possession.  Making sure your spacing is exactly correct and not just more or less.  It's taking hold, I can see.

9.  Against a front court of Pau Gasol and Joachim Noah, Tyler Zeller was the lost man again.  Man, if you are 7', young and love to run the floor, and you cannot get in the game against the 35 year old Spaniard...I saw Gasol trying to run back on defense to stop a fast break by IT (which was stopped by Butler) and he was huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Bear.  Zeller can't get minutes to run against that?  Package him, Danny.  

10.  Stat Roundup:  Two of the top defenses in the league went at it last night, and you saw it in their fg%.  41% by us vs an only very slightly less anemic 43% by them.  22 assists on 38fgm for us vs 22 assists on 39fgm for them.  50 boards vs 45.  5 blocks for them vs 4 for us.  11 fast break points apiece.  We had 10 steals vs 7 for them and we had 12 TOs vs 16 for them.  Our aggressive defense was a little more aggressive than their aggressive defense.  54 points in the paint vs 44 for them.  Who says we have no inside game?


Everybody is pumped for the game tomorrow, as we should be, but I think this was a more meaningful win.  It was against an EC rival.  It was against a team that was ahead of us in the standings.  It was against a very solid veteran team that has high expectations this year and are built for near-term success.  We went from 9th place to 7th with this win and Chicago dropped all the way down to 8th.  That's how close the EC is this year.  We are only 1.5 games behind Cleveland.  Considering the schedule we've had so far, that's amazing.  Without going through everybody's schedule, I'm betting ours will get a little easier while theirs will get a little harder over the next month or two.

This was a big win.  Not because of the standings, there are way too many games to put much weight on that now, but because we beat a quality team at home.  That's how you hold your own, if not advance, in the playoffs.  You win on your court and try to steal one or more on the road against quality teams.


bob


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[dboss]

The Celts are finding different ways to win.

This was a grind em out game and the type of game that builds character.  Eight players in double figures means that this was clearly a team effort.

The Celtics lead the east in +/- differential.  That is more significant than their 13 -9 record.

Can't wait for Smart to get back.  

Mickey's name shows in the box score as a DNP coaches decision.  Was he dressed to play last night?

dboss

[sinus007]

Hi,
Yes, it was a great win.
I was afraid when I saw that none of AB's shots go in. But he compensated by cutting to the hoop and didn't slack on defense.
Another interesting stat: 8 out of 10 Celtics were in double digits.

I was surprised that the announcers didn't talk about black stripes on Celtics jerseys and "Loscy" on their warmups. Might've missed it. If not - shame on ESPN.

AK

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