Baby, these Bulls were born to run
One takeaway from the Bulls outrunning the rest of the league
"We're a lot faster than most teams in the NBA."
That was Lonzo Ball’s proclamation after the Bulls took down the Pelicans 128-112 in their home opener to improve to 2-0. The Pelicans were lucky to only lose by 16 -- They had to hit 52 percent of their 3’s to even get that close.
There was a lot of fun stuff to take away from this game, but I’m going to try to keep my observations to a minimum on back-to-backs. Sometimes, these games require more sitting back and enjoying how awesome the product is rather than When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer-style analysis. This is one of those games, and if you’re going to watch one highlights package this year, this is it.
The one thing that is worth taking away from these two games is that this team has continued to run. Not only is that a smart strategy, it is extremely entertaining to watch.
.
The average amount of fast break points for a team falls somewhere in the 12 to 13 per game range depending on the year. The Bulls were on the low end last year, averaging 11.5. This year, they’ve scored 15 and 24 in their two games, both big numbers.
Intuitively, we should know that transition shots are the best ones in the game. Every coach (aside from one get my team crawling advocate) wants to get more of these looks, which are usually downhill layups, open 3’s, or shooting fouls. The amount of times coaches say it in preseason could fill bingo cards. But getting a team to actually do it is hard. It is largely about motivating guys to put forth maximum effort all the time.
This Bulls team is starting to remind me of Dave Joerger’s 2019 team in Sacramento. He led them to a massive 12-win leap by averaging a by far league-best 20.9 fast break points per game. They fired Joerger after that year, slipped back down to 12.7 points per game, and dropped by eight wins. Whoops.
The fast break points is a number that I’ll be watching all year. It’s a much better indicator of how fast a team is playing than pace, which can be heavily skewed by offensive rebounds and slow opponents. If the Bulls can stay above 15 per game, they will be good. If they can get near that 20 point mark of the Kings, then they are going to be unstoppable.
Big, big props to Billy “The Boss” Donovan for getting these guys running.
All of my basketball work is completely donation-based. If you’ve enjoyed it, please consider supporting me so that I can keep on doing this.
You can subscribe to my newsletter and get all stories sent directly to your inbox when I write. Select the “free” option to get all of my stories, or choose the paid option if you want to support me regularly for $5/month (cancel any time):
You can also donate any amount through Venmo at my username Stephen-Noh-1. A couple bucks is more than enough. If asked for last four digits of my phone number: 1483.
Baby, these Bulls were born to run
What a fun game to watch and that was a great highlight package on the YouTube video! I felt like I was watching a month's worth of highlights in one game!
The only downside was another pretty quiet game from PWill. He's just not flashing much this year, granted in only two games and with a lot of new teammates. Hopefully his defense is making an impact otherwise I'd be curious if Billy D would consider moving him to the bench if this trend continues. To my untrained eye Green seems to be flashing more when he's on the floor but maybe PWill is doing some of the dirty work that doesn't pop out to the casual observer.
Stephen - I think you need to start a PWill concern meter since most of us were expecting a leap this year. I'm not hitting the panic button yet but from 1-5 with 1 being panic-mode I'd say I'm slipping down to a 3 after the first couple of games. Too soon?
Some of this is a by-product of a defense that is deflecting and stealing more balls (it seems). Whatever weaknesses some of the bench players have offensively, they are really active defensively, and with Ball and Caruso leading the effort, it looks like they are generating offense from all this activity.