Miami against Chicago. The Bulls versus the Heat.

No matter how you look at it, this is another one of those matchups that, by mid-season, everyone was aching to see, just like the Heat/Celtics series from the round before. The postseason has been intense and that does not look to be faltering as we move into the later rounds. 

The storyline is interesting; in the offseason, both LeBron James and the hometown boy Dwyane Wade turned down an impassioned pitch from the Bulls to join their team. Wade brought LeBron and Chris Bosh to the Heat, as well as several other roleplayers, all joined beneath Erik Spoelstra, Pat Riley smiling down upon the team he had assembled.

The Bulls hired Boston assistant coach Tom Thibodeau, signed Carlos Boozer and a few role players. 

Riley and Gar Forman of the Bulls would share the Executive of the Year award, while Thibodeau would win Coach of the Year, after having built a strong reputation for defensive excellence for his time with the Boston Celtics over the previous three seasons. For Thibodeau, however, it was simply another stop on a journey all about defense. He’d spent time as an advance scout for the Payton-era Sonics, worked as an assistant coach in San Antonio, gone to the Finals as an assistant to the Van Gundy-led Knicks and then to Houston (also under Jeff Van Gundy). Pretty much every stop he made helped and defense had definitely defined each of those teams. 

In 2010-11, defense became the calling card of the Bulls as they topped the league in defensive rating despite struggling with health in their frontcourt (and playing Carlos Boozer). Dominating the glass and playing suffocating defense, the Bulls charged out and led the entire league in wins before winning their first two postseason matchups on the strength of their mostly-healthy frontcourt (Boozer’s turf toe aside), their suffocating defense and last but surely not least, the work of the youngest MVP in league history, Derrick Rose. 

Despite struggling with his three-point range at times during the season, Rose turned in an extremely impressive 25 ppg season on solid efficiency for what was otherwise a middling offensive squad with little ability to create its own shots. Rose has scored nearly 29 ppg in the playoffs, and though his efficiency is noticeably lower as he takes many more threes at much lower effectiveness, he’s still passing exceptionally well and the Bulls remain a dominant defensive team. 

The Bulls undoubtedly will test the Heat. Just like Boston, they will force the Heat to work very hard for their points. More importantly, they are younger than the Celtics and will not likely falter as badly down the stretch due to fatigue as did the Celtics. Very much like the Celtics, however, where they have the potential to fail will be in their very vulnerable offensive production. Without Rose playing at the top of his game, the Chicago offense will be vulnerable to the effects of another elite defensive team. It will be interesting to see who spends most of the time checking Rose, though; Wade has the best combination of physical attributes and defensive acumen to do so, certainly more than Mario Chalmers or Mike Bibby. He will, however, be counted upon heavily to create and facilitate offense, so he will not be able to spend full-time minutes dogging Rose. How Miami works to cut off Rose’s lanes to the hoop and exploit Chicago’s relatively underwhelming perimeter game will be key to their chances to win.  

Miami is primarily going to attack from the perimeter through Wade and LeBron, seeking to create lanes to the basket and put pressure on Chicago’s frontline through foul trouble, and they are very good at that style of play. The issue will be putting so much pressure on those two on the catch that they are swarmed with a wall of defenders before they get momentum, because once they start to move it’s all over. Boston did this with some success against Kobe Bryant over the last few years and as well to both Wade and LeBron at times (though they seemed to have more trouble with Wade). Chicago’s defense will be primarily about that and possession control through rebounding, at which they excel. 

These two teams aren’t all that dissimilar; both of them are outstanding at rebounding and defense. Miami is actually a bad offensive rebounding team typically, which isn’t good news for them given that the Bulls were the best defensive rebounding team in the league.  They are going to have a fairly slim margin of error in terms of their shot selection and their ability to create offense because the Bulls aren’t going to permit the Heat to get a lot of second chances, though the reverse is true as well since Miami was the second-best defensive rebounding squad in the league. Where Miami has the edge is that they have a second offensive creator and a third player who has very strong offensive value most nights (and won’t be matched up against a great individual or physical defender).  

The Bulls are a very good team, but I expect the Heat to take this series in six or seven games simply because they have a far more potent offense and the gap between the two teams there is a lot larger than between what they can do on defense and the boards. If any two of the Big Three get going in a single game, Miami’s offense will be superior to what the Bulls can manage and that should give them the edge, though that remains an interesting question given the defensive prowess of this Chicago squad. 

What will be interesting to see is less the first game of the series so much as the third and fourth games; Thibodeau is known for being able to make adjustments and for dragging a lot of powerful defensive effort out of his guys and if the Bulls are able to frustrate and stall the offensive production of the Heat stars, their roleplayers will have to do a lot more and that’s typically been an issue. 

In the Boston series, the Miami bench came through; can they do so in timely fashion again, this time against the Bulls? If they even contribute at a minimal level and the Heat get themselves going through their stars, this will be a hard-fought and tightly-contested series, but they should come out the victors in the end.