Robin Lopez, Jimmy Butler, and Bobby Portis showed up and showed off for the Chicago Bulls on Sunday night in a hard-fought victory that almost wasn’t.
Despite a late charge from the home team, the Eastern Conference’s eighth-seeded Chicago Bulls took down the top-seeded Boston Celtics to take a 1-0 series lead on Sunday night, 106-102.
Chicago sure didn’t make it easy for themselves. The “Hoibulls” shot just 8-for-25 from 3-point range to the Celtics’ 14-for-38 shooting, and let the Celtics pull within two after being up nine with 48 seconds to go.
Finally, a great offensive rebound and clutch free throw makes from Robin Lopez and Jimmy Butler finally shut the door. Three starters in Dwyane Wade (who botched a dunk, poor guy), Rajon Rondo and Nikola Mirotic didn’t play particularly well and the Bulls still won!
Isaiah Thomas played great under unimaginably sad circumstances and Al Horford offered up solid support to his All-Star teammate. The rest of the Celtics struggled against the Bulls’ size and hustling moxie; attributes which produced a serious rebounding advantage.
The Bulls’ length really bothered the Celtics, especially since their main bigs were the finesse-oriented Horford, the doughy and slow Kelly Olynyk and Amir Johnson, good for six fouls and not much else (he had just three on Sunday).
Before the start of the series, the Celtics were pegged by ESPN as the likeliest first-round favorite ripe for an upset among all the top seeds. The Bulls needed to steal home-court advantage quickly to make this much of a contest at all and they did it. Though Chicago fans don’t love this awkward Bulls team, Chicago can turn that perception around with three more W’s in this series.
The Bulls seem to be handling this all with level heads, too, which has to make you optimistic if you’re a Chicago fan. That’s the best way to deal with this series, where they are (by record differential) the biggest underdogs in their conference. Keep an even keel, don’t get too high after a win or too low after a loss and stay the course.
Rajon Rondo, always good for a blurb, had a particularly telling post-game quote:
Gotta love Rondo keeping it real: "I don't know about a statement game. All we did is win one game."
— K.C. Johnson (@KCJHoop) April 17, 2017
He’s right. This was a victory the Bulls needed to get, either on Sunday or in the follow-up on Tuesday. Now they’ve got it.
But until they win a couple more, there’s no statement to be made. Maybe handling the victory with grace is the practical thing to do, since the Bulls will now be combating the following bummer of a statistic:
The Bulls have lost 5 of their last 7 playoff series when taking a 1-0 lead.
— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) April 17, 2017