With 14 seconds left in the game, Bulls up by two, Kirk Hinrich tried to force a pass into Ben Gordon on the inbound play, which was stolen by Chris Bosh, giving Toronto a shot to tie or win the game. Hinrich’s mistake didn’t matter, as Noah blocked Chris Bosh’s turnaround jumper with 5 seconds left in the game. The Raptors promptly fouled Deng, who sank both free throws to give the Bulls the 102 to 98 victory over the Toronto Raptors.

Coming into the game, Vinny Del Negro had to find the answer to the question of what you do when your roster is overloaded with guards and is lacking in the front court. The answer was quite simple for Vinny, end the Larry Hughes getting minutes as a Chicago Bull era and play a three guard lineup with Thabo Sefolosha at power forward and Andres Nocioni at center.

At first, it seemed like the return of Kirk Hinrich into the lineup would end up in disaster, with Del Negro sending Hinrich over to the scorers table to check in for Gordon within the opening minutes of the game. Del Negro came to his senses, and left Gordon in for large portions of the rest of the game, despite Gordon playing horribly. Gordon scored only 10 points on 4-13 shooting. He got a lot of good looks at the basket, but couldn’t connect on 7 of his 9 three point attempts tonight. Outside of his scoring, Gordon played solid defense and was very turnover prone in the first half.

Kirk Hinrich did pretty well in his second game back, finishing with 12 points, 6 assists, and 5 rebounds. Hinrich was a very good glue guy tonight, moving the ball, playing great defense, and directing other players on the court. All of Hinrich’s field goal attempts tonight were three pointers. Hinrich moved well off the ball, getting himself in position for some nice, open three point looks.

But the best guard tonight was the rookie, Derrick Rose, who had one of his finest games of his career, finishing with 25 points and 10 assists. When he drove to the basket, the Raptors met him with zero resistance. A trend is starting to set in with Derrick Rose. Against teams with good shotblockers, he generally struggles, and teams without shotblockers, he dominates. Rose will need to get his jumpshot going again to beat up on the teams with good interior defense.

The best part about Derrick tonight was that he made big shot after big shot in the fourth to get the Bulls the win.

Luol Deng had a really nice game tonight. He finished with 16 points, 14 rebounds, and 4 assists. Luol Deng was really active tonight, making a lot of good cuts, and the guards found him for good looks. A few days ago on Mully and Hanley John Paxson said that Luol Deng is at his best when the ball moves and Luol moves. The style Paxson described was on display tonight, and Luol did excellent in it.

The Bulls on a whole moved the ball very well, passing for 33 assists.

As usual, the Bulls got clobbered by the Raptors front court. Andrea Bargnani had 10 rebounds to go along with his career high 31 points. Chris Bosh added in 25 points, but was plagued with foul trouble throughout the game.

Andres Nocioni, who the Raptors may be targeting, had 16 points.

Anthony Parker put in 15 points for the Raptors. Thabo Sefolosha had 9 points for the Bulls.

Tonight was a nice victory, because the Bulls actually has a semblance of an offense system in place. There were a lot of new wrinkles in the offense that haven’t been seen all season. There was lots of new off the ball movement and some Aaron Gray post ups. This begs the question, what took so long Del Negro? Why did it take 39 games into the season to see this stuff?

The only real disappointment in tonight’s game, besides Gordon’s poor shooting, was not getting to see Lindsey Hunter make an appearance at power forward in the game.

With the win, the Bulls improve to 17-22 on the season.

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Tags: Aaron Gray, Andrea Bargnani, Andres Nocioni, Anthony Parker, ball movement, Ben Gordon, block, Chicago Bulls, Chris Bosh, Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah, Kirk Hinrich, Luol Deng, poor shooting, post ups, Thabo Sefolosha, Toronto Raptors, Vinny Del Negro

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Game Recap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.