Atlanta home

In a nutshell, Bulls went with a three guard lineup for much of the night and none of them could guard Mike Bibby. It's funny how certain players just play better against certain teams, and Bibby always seems to kill the Bulls. Johnson was off this game, so the Hawks were open for a loss, but the Bulls did not want to go there.

One telling point was that early in the game, Deng and Thomas made one of their lazy mid-range jumpers. My spider sense immediately went off as I knew we would pay for those later. Sure enough, they both clanked a few lazy mid-range jumpers when they should have gone to the basket. Well, Tyrus at least. You see, there was one point where Deng got the ball, and as usual, I'm shouting "drive, drive," and he actually did drive, but only to shovel up the most pathetic excuse for a shot I've ever seen. It was shocking. Here, for so long, I thought the answer to Deng's problems was to go to the hole and now it turns out that he's even worse at that than his terrible mid-range jumper. I blame him for this loss more than anyone, since he bricked a key jumper in the stretch, but in reality, there was plenty of blame to go around.

And Tyrus, well he looked cool and got some highlights by blocking shots, but he didn't play a lick of defense otherwise. There was another memorable moment when Tyrus and Deng were put into the game at the same time, just before our traditional third quarter collapse, and the lack of intensity on both of their faces was so striking that I immediately said: "here comes the lazy twins." Back when the Bulls were a championship team, you could see the steely determination on just about everyone's face. I think M.J. stamped it there before the game and Phil read them some philosophy to turn them into mystical warriors. Now, they look like they can't wait to get the game over with so they can go home and play on their Xbox.

As for the not so fearsome threesome of Ben/Derrick/Kurt, they were not quite terrible, but they've all had far better games. They combined for 12 turnovers, 3 more than the Hawks had total. And none of them shot well. Ben at least got to the line for some free throws when he's shot wasn't working, and after his Knicks performance it was great to at least see some of his shots go down. And as I already said, they watched Bibby drop 31 on them.