Monday NBA Roundup: Bulls Offensive Chemistry Proving Doubters Wrong

Either the Chicago Bulls are engineering the greatest fake-it-until-you-make it con in recent NBA history, or everyone’s preseason projections were wrong.

With their third consecutive offensive onslaught, Jimmy Butler and a revamped Bulls roster continued scoring in a volume and manner that can only be described as shocking. They shredded the Brooklyn Nets (and the nylon ones) on Monday, notching a 118-88 win.

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Jimmy Butler erupted early, hitting a pair of threes in the game’s opening minutes. He finished with a game-high 22, and his scoring surge was part of a team-wide 7-of-10 start that ballooned into a 38-20 first-quarter advantage.

Chicago cruised from there, finding little resistance in a Nets club suffering from a cruel contrast in perimeter accuracy. Brooklyn hit an abysmal 5-of-31 from long range and shot 34.4 percent overall. The Bulls posted marks of 50.6 percent from the field and 40.7 percent from deep.

They even knocked in 17-of-18 foul shots, though they could have missed them all and still won by double figures.

It wasn’t just that the threes were falling. Chicago’s fluid offense got its juice in breakaways that may as well have been direct rebuttals to the idea that Butler, Rajon Rondo and Dwyane Wade couldn’t coexist. Put another way, this is not an example of three alphas stopping the ball and looking for their own buckets:

Everyone pitched in: Rondo had 10 points on 5-of-8 shooting in only 25 minutes, while Wade contributed a dozen points and hit another three, running his season total to five on nine attempts. Last year, he was 7-of-44.

This bizarre new wrinkle in Wade’s game is already paying dividends. Opponents now feel compelled to take up his airspace on the perimeter, which leads to things like this:

The shooting contagion infected the Bulls bench, too. Nikola Mirotic scored 16 points and hit four of his 10 triples, while Isaiah Canaan (!) knocked down three treys in four attempts en route to 15 points. For crying out loud, rookie Denzel Valentine got his first NBA bucket…and it was a three.

There are subversions and surprises at the start of every NBA regular season, but this feels like the biggest so far, doesn’t it?

I mean, this is the Bulls—a team Frankensteined into existence over the summer, an abomination bereft of spacing and seemingly doomed to grind-it-out mediocrity. And that was the best-case scenario. If the Butler-Wade-Rondo dynamic didn’t work in the locker room, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect a midseason fire sale.

The most common reaction at how well this is all working continues to be disbelief, as Sam Smith of Bulls.com illustrated:

Bulls with fourth three pointer; 11 assists on 17 baskets; 20-point lead. Those are not Halloween costumes. Those are the Bulls, it seems

— Sam Smith (@SamSmithHoops) November 1, 2016

Chicago has talent, and it’s fitting together unexpectedly well, which forces some concessions.

For starters, it seems fair to say head coach Fred Hoiberg wasn’t as overmatched as he appeared last year, and that his open, uptempo style was just saddled with too many plodders. With Rondo’s pace and vision, Wade’s pick-your-spot bursts and Butler’s unquestioned athleticism, maybe Hoiberg’s sets are simply now being run by personnel actually capable of running them.

In addition to a fresh look at Hoiberg, the Bulls’ start is forcing other referendums. Maybe Rondo isn’t poison on both ends. Maybe Wade, the old dog, …

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