The Bulls finished the regular season on Sunday night with a record of 46-36; that’s good for the #6 seed in the East. We also found out who the #3 seed in the East will be; the Milwaukee Bucks will be our opponent in the first round of the playoffs. The Bulls made the playoffs!!! This is awesome! As for the first round matchup… the Bulls made the playoffs!!! This is awesome!
Let’s go back to last year this time. The Bulls finished 31-41 in the COVID shortened season. How about the year before? 22-43 in the first COVID impacted regular season. The Bulls .561 winning percentage is their best since Thibs’ last year in 2014-2015… so 7 years ago. They did make the playoffs 5 years ago with a 500 record. In either case, it’s been a while. The Bulls took the jump many of us had hoped for heading into this season. For this, we should be very excited. Problem is, that jump the Bulls took, was to the #1 seed in the East for a good portion of this season. Thing is, the Bulls finished 7-15 in their last 22 games of the season; they couldn’t beat a top team pretty much all year. The Bulls had us going for a minute there… like, forget just improving, forget just making the playoffs, this team could make some noise in the playoffs. I think the last quarter of the season has brought us back down to earth.
I was hoping for a first round matchup with the Celtics. If we put the Heat, Bucks, and 76ers in the East’s top tier, certainly that next tier would include the Celts and Bulls; that would have been the most ideal first round matchup IMO. But, things did not work out according to what I would have liked; go figure. And now, the Bulls face the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks lead by a guy we can’t stop in Giannis. Hey, the Bulls did beat the Bucks once… last year. Outside of that victory, the Bucks have beat the Bulls 16 of the past 17 games; yeah, it’s that bad. How do you say that? They own us? It didn’t used to be that way, but it has been that way for the majority of the past 5 seasons. The Bucks are 4-0 this year against us with an average margin of victory at about 15 points. However, if you take a closer look at those matchups, you’ll see it was really a tale of two halves; the first two matchups vs the Bucks vs the last two. The first two, we lost by 4 and 6 points respectively; that’s respectable. The last two, well, that is what is fresh in everybody’s heads. Besides being the defending champs, besides having Giannis, besides the Bulls slide, the fact that the Bucks beat the Bulls by 28 and 21 points in each of the last two matchups, has everybody and their mama picking the Bucks to cruise this series; I understand why. Yet, I also know that when something seems to good to be true, it usually isn’t; I will be leaning on this principle to keep a positive attitude heading into the series that will most likely begin on Easter Sunday. Plenty more days to discuss…
So yeah, Bucks in 4 right? Worst case 5? Well, part of my brain tells me that’s about right; the other part remembers the first two matchups. My heart believes the Bulls can make this a very competitive series. Containing Giannis will be one of the keys; is that possible? Short of an injury, Giannis will get his, right? Do we focus on shutting down the other guys? Much more to come about this series; I’ll be talking about it most of this week. But for today, I’m just glad we’re still talking Bulls… and not about what their offseason will look like. I’m also glad we won’t be talking about how the refs will help LeBron and his team of the year move on in the playoffs; never miss a chance to take a jab at that. Congrats to the Chicago Bulls for playing in the 2nd season again; some may say the NBA is better when this is true. For all of us fans, we deserve it; we deserve to see our team give it a run in the playoffs. We got it… we got it. Go Bulls!!!
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