Gasol’s block, Butler’s steal seal Bulls’ season-opening win over Cavs
For many fans, including one pretty famous one, it’s been the key question ever since the Chicago Bulls front office made the choice to jettison defensive wizard Tom Thibodeau in favor of the more offensive-minded Fred Hoiberg. Will a more free-flowing version of the Bulls — the kind of team that starts Nikola Mirotic over Joakim Noah — still be able to hold fast and get stops when it matters most?
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Well, it’s only one game, but so far, so good.
With just over seven seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of a nip-and-tuck matchup with the defending Eastern Conference champion Cleveland Cavaliers, the Bulls faced the unenviable task of stopping four-time MVP and longtime ruiner of Chicagoans’ evenings LeBron James as he barreled into the paint off a Tristan Thompson screen with a head of steam. As James drove right and gained the lane, center Pau Gasol — whose defensive work often left much to be desired, even as he worked his way to an All-Star berth during his first season in the Windy City — stepped up and slid with him.
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James elevated with a right-handed layup that in years past, before all those minutes and these more recently recurring back issues, probably would have been a tomahawk slam. Instead of getting dunked on, though, Gasol sent LeBron’s offering back in his face and sent “The King” to the deck on the baseline, eliciting roars from the United Center crowd for maintaining a two-point lead with 3.6 seconds remaining.
As Bulls fans remember all too well, though, those remaining ticks still left plenty of time for LeBron to make magic. Chicago needed one more stop to seal the deal … and they turned to their newly maxed-out defensive ace to get it:
To be fair, it was a full team effort. Mirotic and Gasol handled the switch of the double screen set by Thompson and Kevin Love, ensuring that inbounder Mo Williams had no clean passing option in the near corner, and an attentive Derrick Rose made sure that Matthew Dellavedova didn’t get free on the weak side. But it was Butler who fought through the screens to stick with James, who re-established contact with him at the foul line, who stayed connected as Williams lobbed the ball in, and who made sure LeBron never got to touch it, deflecting it up into the air and batting it away as the clock ran out, securing a season-opening 97-95 Bulls win over the team that eliminated them from last spring’s playoffs.
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“We practice those late-game situations,” Butler said after the game, according to K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune. “Everyone knows who’s going to get the ball. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Save for a late-third-quarter rest and a relative lack of lift on that final possession, James didn’t seem much the worse for wear after missing the final couple of weeks of the preseason with back woes. He led all scorers with 25 points on 12-for-22 shooting, grabbed 12 rebounds, dished five assists, grabbed one steal and turned the ball over just once in 36 minutes of work.
Making his first start of the season in place of Noah as Hoiberg looks to both balance a crowded frontcourt rotation and introduce more shooting and playmaking to help his dribble-drive motion offense hum, Mirotic led the way for Chicago with 19 points on 6-for-11 shooting, including a 3-for-4 mark from downtown, with nine rebounds in 25-plus minutes of work. Butler added 17 points on 6-for-14 shooting with five rebounds, two assists, two steals and a block in a team-high 37 minutes.
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After a tremendous turn in leading Spain to EuroBasket 2015 gold this summer, Gasol was quiet offensively, going scoreless in the first half of a game for the first time in 6 1/2 years before finishing with just two points on 1-for-7 shooting. But he did add six blocked shots, none larger than the one that left LeBron laying on the line.
Playing with a clear protective mask after undergoing surgery last month to repair a fractured orbital bone, Derrick Rose looked largely as he did throughout last season when healthy — eager to find his own offense, quick off the bounce and shaky (which is putting it mildly) when rising and firing. (To be fair, he’s still suffering a bit from double-vision after his eye injury.)
Bulls fans briefly felt a familiar sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs after Rose seemed to pull up lame following a missed layup nearly two minutes into the second quarter:
After being replaced by veteran backup Aaron Brooks and heading to the sidelines for a few minutes, though, Rose checked back in midway through the quarter and seemed just fine, especially when using his speed to blow by Williams and Dellavedova on the perimeter and his strength to finish after contact:
Rose would finish with 18 points on 8-for-22 shooting — including an unseemly 3-for-10 mark inside the restricted area — with five assists, a steal and two turnovers in 32 1/2 minutes.
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Rarely shy during his rookie season after starring in Spain, Mirotic seemed even more emboldened by his elevation into the starting lineup by Hoiberg. He looked to push the ball on the break whenever he grabbed it off the rim and fired seven shots in nine first-quarter minutes, including an extra-spicy 27-footer right in Love’s face that found nylon:
Mirotic and Gasol looked iffy on the other end early, though, especially on the boards, as Love and Timofey Mozgov dominated on the offensive glass. Chicago’s defense tightened up later in the opening quarter. Some of that was due to the introduction of Noah, who’d grab nine rebounds and dish four assists in 17 scoreless minutes off the bench before leaving with a bruised right knee just after the nine-minute mark of the fourth, and Taj Gibson, who chipped in five points and 10 rebounds before fouling out with 1:38 remaining. Some of it was because the Cavs had to go to a bench that’s awfully thin these days, thanks to Williams taking the place of the injured Kyrie Irving in the starting lineup and top perimeter reserve Iman Shumpert sidelined after wrist surgery; a 17-2 run put Chicago up nine heading into the second quarter.
The Bulls would hold onto the lead for much of the contest, weathering their own poor shooting by helping induce even worse marksmanship in Cleveland, who shot just 32 percent from the field in the first half, with non-LeBron and Williams Cavs combining to go 6-for-29 through two quarters. Love was one of the key culprits, looking rusty with his shot in the early going of his first full-fledged action after season-ending shoulder surgery.
Despite his shooting struggles, though, Love did look both more comfortable and more centrally located in the Cavaliers offense, moving out of the corners and making plays from up top:
He’d find his shot after intermission, finishing with 18 points, eight rebounds, four assists and two blocks in 35 minutes, and hitting a pair of big 3-pointers in the final 62 seconds to get Cleveland within a basket in the closing seconds. But that final bucket never came, as a pair of timely stops from Gasol and Butler gave Chicago the first victory in this season’s battle for Eastern Conference supremacy and sent Bulls fans — including that pretty famous one — home happy:
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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