I had a feeling the Bulls homecourt advantage was nothing special, and that they may get down double digits early. That's happened before. Maybe they'd stay reasonably close and make a game of it, or maybe they'd always be at arms length and lose.
Paul Pierce put them in the early hole, but that wasn't insurmountable. What really took the game from 'uh oh', to 'oh shit' was a Celtics run to end the 2nd quarter that put them up 22 at the half. It was as if the Bulls were waiting to regroup at halftime and forgot to play the last several minutes of the half first.
I did not expect anything like this, a complete ass-kicking with the largest margin being 34 points and the entire 4th quarter made irrelevant.
Nearly everyone was awful, but I was really disappointed in Tyrus and Noah. They looked so overmatched physically tonight it's enough to question their long term viability as a tandem. It was that bad. So many times they fumbled passes, or got stripped, or were pushed out of the paint. By a decimated Celtics front line.
And Brad Miller...I swear, it was like he forgot there was a game tonight.
Too many turnovers, and not enough from the Celtics. And the Bulls can't win if they can't run, not without some ungodly performance from their guards. And neither Rose nor Gordon did much tonight, as the C's were more aggressive in pressuring them, and the Bulls bigs had to make them pay for it. Instead they put in a terrible offensive performance.
Some positives:
- Kirk Hinrich played alright
- No worries about Vinny's timeouts
- Vinny was able to follow through on his promise to play Tim Thomas
- I was able to leave early
- I got a nice red towel to wipe my ass with