A few weeks ago ABC decided to drop our Suns-Bulls game from national TV and went with the Celtic-Magic. It's hard to argue now that they made a bad call. This game was ugly. The other game was not.
Let's just get this over with quickly. Rip the band aid right off:
3's weren't falling
Got killed on the boards
Again
Marion played D
Bulls can't shoot (Noah can't even dunk)
LB got separation
A W is a W
Maybe someone else can find something profound in this game. A sign of things to come. A corner turned. A trend started or ended or continued or demolished. But all I can come up with was a fairly blah offensive performance which was still good enough to beat a depleted Bulls team that threw up more air-balls then you will see at your normal pee-wee game.
I suppose the big news for Suns fans is the continued futility on the boards. All year we have discussed this. Is it the much smaller line up the Suns play or lack or emphasis and effort? Of course, it's both. I felt like the Suns team played hard so we will have to wait for the game flow stats from Popcorn Machine's great web site, but I suspect that for the better part of the game the Bulls had two seven footers on the floor along with a guy like Tyrus Thomas at the 3. TT would be a center on the Suns team.
For the last game of fairly unimpressive 3 and 1 road trip played at basket-brunch time I suppose its best just to call it a day and come home to start a stretch of 7 of 8 at home that includes the Spurs, Hornets, Mavs and Warriors before the all star break.
Sherpa's of the Game:
- Amare's 24 pts on 9-16 and an impressive 38 minutes considering his early foul troubles
- Marion's 11 boards, 6 steals, 15 pts and great lock down performance on D against Kirk at some key moments
- Barbosa's 5-8 13 points which included the key baskets late in the game to finally get separation