man, if all those guys are out who is gonna play the brooklyn firefighters' team for the charity game?



he's day-to-day with a nagging case of buttmad!

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bulls might pitch a shutout tonight.... 7-0 and mirotic's shot is on early!

i dont think these nets are any good, really are they?

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This Nets team is fucking terrible.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

yeah i was just coming here to say the same thing..... HOT GARBAGE!

they seem to like giving the bulls open looks, and to the bulls' credit they're converting them early. nice flow thus far.... we even got our dougie mcbuckets sighting early!

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one thing i'm noticing right away is that hoiberg isnt afraid to give jimmy and derrick a rest.... bulls got up by like ~16 early and next thing you know you look out there and see aaron brooks and etwan moore and joakim and whatnot. the announcers said rose and butler had 32 and 36mins respectively, and this seems to be something that bodes well for the future.

now the nets are starting to hit open buckets and it's down to 10, but hoiberg managed to grab jimmy and derrick and pau and even mirotic good 5+min rests, so he seems open to using the situations of the game to getting some extra rotation in there. this is nice to see!

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welp, update from the front:

the bulls aren't shooting 65% like they were in the first quarter.... they're not especially interested in defense either. now all of a sudden the nets are hitting open shots and are 58% overall and it's a 3pt game with 2:50 left before halftime.

soooo yeah, while the nets aren't all that, if you give any NBA team enough open shots they're bound to start hitting them.... and since things came so easily to the bulls early they're forcing things and turning the ball over wholesale and whatnot.

stacey king pointed out that on this team players might not be walking on eggshells that much because if they made an error under thibs (usually defensive) they'd hear that substitution horn and know they're getting yanked out of the game and benched. now under hoiberg they dont have to worry about a quick/instant trip to the doghouse if they make a little error on defense (SEE: MCDERMOTT, DOUG)

...but of course now the bulls are sloppy as hell on both offense and defense and this is with their rested stars in there. somewhere i can hear the voice of dan bernstein telling me this is a work in progress!

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one more amazing thing to point out: last night derrick played 32mins and jimmy played 36mins, and even stacey himself said that last year (under thibbs) they both woulda played 40+.... that adds up.

but even more remarkable is now through 1.5 games (assuming that anything didnt change in the last 45secs of the first half which i didnt see) -- HINRICH HASN'T SEEN THE FLOOR! think about that one.... you're actually keeping your starting 2 guards well under 40mins, but not only that you're also keeping the quite-honestly-useless-in-2015 kirk hinrich off of the floor because hoiberg realizes that you might as well try to develop the games of aaron brooks and etwan moore as opposed to putting hinrich out there FOR DEFENSE FIRST AND FOREMOST knowing there is no ultimate payoff of him eventually developing into a good player cuz you only put hinrich out there to try and maximize defense and win the game you're playing that night. you're holding on to the past instead of developing any sort of future, and that's huge IMO.

that said., i'm not just gonna post to myself tonight so i'll pipe down til after the game if nobody else shows up. i guess we'll just have to wait to talk bulls until the bears season ends and it's officially hawks bandwagon season, eh?

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Is Doug still lighting the scoreboard up?

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early early returns = i think that under thibodeau you had a higher floor.... like preaching defense and hustle and insta/perma-benching guys to the doghouse for daring to fail thibbs = you have a team whose worst case scenario is higher than you'll have under hoiberg.... but then again with hoiberg i think you ultimately will have a higher ceiling.... like if everything works out and you max out the offense/potential of everyone on your roster (except hinrich, thank you based god!) then i think you could end up going farther/deeper into the playoffs than you did with thibbs.... but if the bulls are prone to lapses like we saw in the second quarter tonight and they end up giving teams 500 wide open jumpers in a row, then yeah at its worst the hoibulls are gonna end up being able to crash and burn and ultimately look worse than any tom thibodeau lead team.

that said, we'll see if hoiberg was the right or wrong hire.... but i'm glad the bulls are taking a chance and rolling the dice here, even if it's only happening because tom thibodeau was a creepy misogynist who the GM hated as opposed to purely basketball reasons. but then again that thibodeau/skiles-archetype of redass/grinder coach always had a limited shelf life, did they not?

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lol man, whitey McIshopatsears can't create a shot to save his fucking life.... it's downright hilarious to watch him do his thing around/into screens and quickly relinquish the ball ASAP when he doesnt have a shot lined up and handed to him. tonight he's hit a couple'a jumpers in the first half when they're lined up for him, as you figure he should (it's why he gets a NBA salary after all) but outside of that he's totally useless on the court.

that said, lots and i mean LOTS of room for development for him as the guy has to learn how to create something off of the dribble (if not how to get himself open without the play/call doing it for him) in order to become that "kyle korver type" that stacey king would love to have us believe that he is.

but hey it's basically his rookie year so i think around the new year we'll have a good idea of where he really is.

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sinicalypse, Mirotic is the truth!

And the Nets are putrid.

yeah they had a nice second quarter when hoiberg used the ~14+ pt lead to give derrick jimmy mirotic and pau a nice long rest, but then when they came back in they werent playing with urgency and the nets hit their wide open jumpers for awhile.... but down the stretch the bulls are just better than basketball than the nets. that was a huge jumper to go back up 11 with 2mins left cuz the way these teams are both streak shooting (read: not defending) tonight you wanna be able to absorb a few shots.....

...and wow, butler with that emphatic dunk! then look at how quickly/easily they got that layup back!

yeah, just keep hitting your shots and we got this. nets letting the.....WOWOWOWOW MIROTIC FOR 333333333333333333333333333333 UP 15 WITH 45SECS LEFT THATS BALLGAME!

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Easy on the caffien, Bro'...

It's 2 fucking games

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I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.