Gil Scott-Heroin
Veteran
The Bulls have been the league's best defensive team since Chicago hired Tom Thibodeau before the 2011 season. But they've achieved that in a sort of counterintuitive way. The NBA is a pick-and-roll league, and you can feel Thibodeau's stress building when he starts talking about facing "50 or 60 or 70" pick-and-rolls in the same game, "and with so many variations." The pick-and-roll is a two-man play, generally involving a ball handler and a big guy setting a screen for that ball handler. Chicago has built its defense around an interesting principle: It wants one of the two guys directly involved in the pick-and-roll shooting at the end of it.
There are other rules and sub-rules,1 but Chicago under Thibodeau has consistently ranked at or near the top of the league in the percentage of opponent possessions that end with one of those two guys shooting, per Synergy Sports. Other teams, including the Heat, try to force one of the other three guys on the floor to beat them, but Thibodeau wants to make those other three guys borderline useless. That philosophy is based on a rather bold belief: The Bulls think their two defenders, with just a little bit of help, can beat your two offensive players and coax the exact kind of low-efficiency shot you don't want to take. "You're trying to get perfection out of it," Thibodeau tells Grantland, "trying to get as close to perfect as a team could possibly be."
Scary news for the rest of the league: The Bulls are pretty close. Watch film of Chicago's defense until your eyes bleed/your wife kills you and I did and the precision, so close to perfection, is overwhelming and almost beautiful. The Bulls, more than any team I've ever seen including the Duncan-era Spurs and the 2007-08 Celtics, for whom Thibodeau was the defensive coordinator just do not make mistakes. Even Carlos Boozer, justifiably maligned for his flat-flooted defense,2 at least understands Chicago's scheme and places those flat feet in the right place at the right time. He doesn't misread plays, botch rotations, stand up lazy and straight, or gamble irresponsibly, and is thus not actively harmful in the way someone like Monta Ellis or DeMarcus Cousins can be to a team's defense.
Chicago is up to third in points allowed per possession despite dealing with a new wave of injuries and working in a bunch of new parts, including a totally revamped bench. They're struggling on offense and have some rotation questions to answer, but that defense, so damn good, is the reason the Bulls stand 10 games over .500, a sleeping giant of a title contender awaiting the return of the one player who can make its ho-hum offense go.
The Bulls, when facing a high pick-and-roll, go into a powerful scripted routine:
Their point guard, Kirk Hinrich or Nate Robinson, will jump in front of the pick and try to force the ball handler away from the screen and to the left side. I don't have access to the fancy statistical databases that could verify this,3 but I'd bet heavy that Chicago is one of the two or three best teams at getting opposing point guards to go left. Hinrich might be a non-entity on offense and one of the most boring players in the league, but he is willing to engage in physical battles to get between a point guard and a pick. "He has always been very, very difficult to screen," says Gar Forman, the Bulls' GM.
A bonus: By positioning himself between the opposing ball handler and screener at the start of a play, Hinrich stays in or near the passing lane between them as the play develops and each moves toward the rim. Chicago opponents have trouble hitting roll men near the basket because any such pass has to go through a thicket of arms; a startlingly high percentage of shots roll men actually attempt against the Bulls are long 2-point jumpers the worst shot in the game.
The big man guarding the screener (Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson, Boozer) will drop down around the left elbow, hoping to corral the ball handler there. The goal is to force the guard to pick up his dribble so that the big-man defender can return to the big man rolling to the rim.
The three Chicago defenders guarding the shooters around the perimeter generally stay close to home rather than crashing hard into the paint. This is where the Bulls differentiate themselves from lots of other teams, including Miami and Boston. If a pick-and-roll goes left, it is generally the job of the defender guarding a shooter on the right side of the floor the weak side at that point to dash into the paint and bump the big man rolling toward the hoop. This is why you often see such defenders stationed with one foot in the paint, far from their actual "man," before a pick-and-roll even starts.
Chicago is generally opposed to this style of help, maniacally so when that weak-side shooter is a 3-point ace.
"We don't want to overcommit and open ourselves up to a kick-out pass for a corner 3," Thibodeau says. And holy cow, are they successful. Chicago is on pace to allow the fewest corner-3 attempts per game for the third straight season, and it isn't even close. Only two teams have allowed a lower shooting percentage on corner 3s this season, and none outdid Chicago in this regard in either 2010-11 or 2011-12. The degree to which the Bulls execute Thibodeau's wishes is scary.
"It was hard for me to understand at first the rules of our defense," says Marco Belinelli, who signed with the Bulls in the offseason. "Like if we are facing Kyle Korver or Joe Johnson, you have to stay close to those guys always. This is a team, especially with Thibs, where we want to be famous for our defense."
It's not that Chicago is opposed to helping altogether; such stubbornness is folly in the world's best league. They'll help off proven bad shooters in the corners, as Jimmy Butler does here, drifting away from Rodney Stuckey in the right corner to crash a Will BynumAndre Drummond pick-and-roll:
More at The Chicago Bulls and coach Tom Thibodeau's quest for perfection - Grantland
A good analysis of Thibs' defensive system.
I've been in disbelief the last few seasons - at how he manages to keep his team's defensive effectiveness at a high-even level, no matter the personnel.
on the floor.
