A History of the TNT Bulls

Game 5: Chicago towers over the Nets

Basketball-Reference box score.

The Bulls won their third straight with this one, and they did it in a way that might seem foreign to 2017 NBA thinking: by staying big instead of going small. With Boozer back from injury, Chicago was able to keep two of Boozer, Gibson and Noah on the floor at all times. That meant that Paul Pierce, who was starting for the Nets at power forward, had to guard one of them and fight a losing battle for rebounds. It showed.

The Bulls outrebounded Brooklyn 45-27 and didn’t really pay any price for keeping two traditional big men on the floor for the whole game. The Bulls made only four 3-pointers, but the Nets made only five. Small ball has come a long way, even from just three years ago. Nowadays, it’s much rarer to find success playing the way the Bulls did. As of writing this article, there have been 1,086 NBA games played in the 2016-2017 season. In only 28 of them has the winning team made four 3-pointers or fewer. That’s 2.48 percent, compared to 10.33 percent in the 2013-2014 season. It’s a different league now.

Noah finished with 14 points, 13 rebounds and seven assists, his fifth straight double-double. Butler shut down Joe Johnson and scored 14 points of his own in 46 minutes. No, I typed that correctly. There were only two minutes of this game in which Butler wasn’t playing.