New York Knicks at Chicago Bulls: Five Big Takeaways from Bulls Loss
Dwyane Wade
What is there to say about Wade at this point? He’s absolutely destroying any perceptions about the type of player he can be on any given night.
There were more than a handful of times that Wade willingly found himself in terrible positions that he ought to not be in, defiantly giving the figurative middle finger to analytics. But when he wasn’t busy picking up his dribble and hoisting up 20-foot fadeaways that improbably found the bottom of the net, he was jacking up 3-point attempts that kept connecting. By the end of the night, all that an onlooker could do was recall The Princess Bride and scream, “Inconceivable!”
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Five games. It only took five games of the 2016-17 season for Wade to eclipse his number of made 3-point shots over the course of 74 games last year. Wade, a career 28.6 percent 3-point shooter, made only seven attempts last season on 44 attempts during those 74 games. Through five games this year, he is 10-for-19, over 50 percent.
That tally is completely unexplainable and totally enjoyable. On Friday night, he shot 12-for-20 from the field, including 5-for-7 from 3-point range. His 35 points in 33 minutes is a worthy celebration for a savvy veteran like Wade, who may never again score more points than his age, 34, in a single game.
He didn’t just connect from 3, the mid-range game was going for him and he attacked the rim, using high IQ to get up and under players like the tree-sized Porzingis for a lay-in.
Scoring wasn’t everything, Wade also grabbed 10 rebounds, en route to a double-double. At one point, Wade celebrated an and-one call with a jump-kick and sprint to mid-court. I joked that he spent all the energy he was going to use playing games 70 through 82 on the schedule when he did that. Hopefully, I was wrong. The season is long and Chicago is going to need Wade to keep looking more like a Golden State player than his former ISO, slow-paced self if they want to be competitive in games throughout the year. Without the big performance from Wade, this game would have been ugly.