You can always trust Pippen Ain’t Easy to give you the skinny on exactly how to watch Friday night’s game between the Chicago Bulls and the Atlanta Hawks.
Next: Bulls Blurbs from 1/19/2017: Tank, tank, tank
Following a depressing 99-98 loss to the freaking 14-27 Dallas Mavericks on Tuesday, Jimmy Butler and the Chicago Bulls (21-22) look to rebound against the Atlanta Hawks (24-17) in Philips Arena on Friday night.
The Hawks have won nine of their last 10 games, amidst a flurry of Paul Millsap trade rumors (the Raptors, Nuggets and Kings were listed as prime targets) and an actual Kyle Korver trade. Korver, a 2015 All-Star on that 60-win Hawks team, was replaced on the wing by another sharpshooting, white 35+ year-old Bulls alum, Mike Dunleavy, who has much less gas in the tank than Korver after missing much of his final two Bulls seasons with a variety of maladies.
For the year, Dunleavy is averaging just 5.7 points per game while shooting a poor 40.7 percent from the field, but a solid 38.8 percent from deep. When Atlanta flipped Korver, most pundits assumed Millsap was next. But apparently, he has been rescinded from the trade market now, on the heels of a mighty seven-game Hawks winning streak. That probably just means Atlanta’s price for the All-Star power forward has increased.
More from Bulls News
- The dream starting 5 for the Chicago Bulls 5 years from now
- Bulls’ Ayo Dosunmu inspires the future with new school program
- Chicago Bulls NBA 2K24 full roster ratings, risers, and fallers
- Bulls sign a pair of promising guards to Exhibit 10 contracts
- When does NBA Training Camp start? Dates Bulls fans need to know
A quick tangent on those 60-win Hawks (four of the five starters from that team have moved on, by the way): they got swept by the Cavaliers in the Conference Finals. Now sure, they were dealing with some injury issues of their own (Korver missed two games, Thabo Sefolosha missed the entire series), but Cleveland was too at the time (Kevin Love missed the whole series, Kyrie Irving missed two games), so there’s no real excuse.
The Bulls, however, took Cleveland to six games in the prior round, and we all know that the Bulls almost certainly should have won Game 4, and had a great shot at closing things out in Game 5, had it not been for shoddy ref calls.
So, I still harbor a lot of bitterness over the fact that so many hoops reporters have praised that 60-win Hawks squad (seriously, there’s nothing “magical” about getting swept), a team that coasted to a great regular season record, sure, but a team that was probably just the third-best team in the Eastern Conference.
Anyway, that was many players ago. Now both teams are shells of those 50- and 60-win squads, though the modern Hawks seem to have a more promising core of Millsap, a somewhat-improved and refocused Dwight Howard, and Dennis Schroder.
The Bulls have Jimmy Butler, an old Dwyane Wade, a slow Taj Gibson, Robin Lopez and… a bunch of spare parts.
Who: Chicago Bulls vs. Atlanta Hawks
Where: Philips Arena, Atlanta, Georgia
When: 7:00 PM CT
TV: WGN-TV
Radio: WLS-AM 890 in Chicago
Live Stream: NBA League Pass