after watching Rose torch the C's with penetration all night, I'm a little surprised Doc didn't try Bradley for a few minutes to see if he could at least stay in front of him. Couldn't have defended any worse than Nate or Rondo. for that matter, he couldn't have done a significantly worse in getting the team into its offense either.
Unless Bradley was going to get over Thomas' picks, he wouldn't have done much better than Rondo. Our biggest problem (when Robinson wasn't defending him) was our inability to extend our defense to the ball. As soon as Rondo got picked off, Rose had 10 feet of room to speed up and hurtle himself into our big men (hence the 19 foul shots). I guess Rondo could have gone under the picks more, but that didn't seem to be the C's strategy.
TP for pointing out the job Kurt Thomas did setting picks. That was a clinic; good, hard, solid, clean picks all night. Derrick Rose owes Kurt Thomas an expensive dinner for that one.
This is going to sound absurd, but I actually thought Rondo did a good job defensively. It looked to me like he was working his butt off to get over those picks all night. He even was able to disrupt Rose quite a few times. Thomas was just punishing him too much, and D. Rose was in a different world last night. Once he got that corner turned just a sliver, there was almost no doubt he was scoring. That ridiculous little push shot pull up was dropping every time, and once he went all the way, all we could do was foul him.
Tipping my hat to a very good performance by the Bulls last night, and moving on.
Topic: Celtics (28-7) at Bulls (23-12) (Read 51188 times)