Believing in the Bulls as title contenders

Luol Deng and Co. are in position to win the East's No. 1 seed. (Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images)

David Locke, the radio voice of the Utah Jazz, was kind enough to have me on his podcast this week. He surprised me toward the end by asking about whispers he hears that the Bulls might “not have another gear” for the postseason. The question surprised me because it was the precise topic — down to the phrase “another gear” — that came up in several hallway conversations I had with reporters and team officials at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston only two weeks ago.

That is how good the Bulls have gotten already. The skepticism about them all season, justified at first, has shifted from whether they could nab a top-three seed to whether they can really challenge Boston or Miami to whether they have the mythical “next gear” for the playoffs. In other words, with the Bulls leading the Eastern Conference and having the best odds of winning the title under John Hollinger’s system, all we have left to question now is some mystery about an intangible “gear” some teams may have in reserve for the playoffs. And while some teams have clearly done this — both the Lakers and Celtics from last season, for instance — the fact is that regular-season performance remains the best predictor of playoff success.

The Bulls, by any measure, are a legitimate title contender — possibly even the favorite as things stand now. If there’s a fair knock against them, it’s their middling offense. Chicago ranks only 15th in points per possession and remains prone to the occasional droughts. But the Bulls also possess the league’s best defense, and if you’re going to excel at one end of the floor, history suggests you are better off building a great defense and cobbling together whatever scoring you can manage. Neil Paine of Basketball-Reference noted this last August, when he found that having an elite defense was a slightly stronger predictor of championship contention than an elite offense. A much less sophisticated analysis of recent conference finalists suggests the same.

If you examine the NBA’s final four from every season since the 1998-99 lockout year, you find that 13 teams have made the conference finals with an offense that ranked outside the top 10; nine of those 13 teams advanced to the Finals, and two (the 2003-04 Pistons and last season’s Lakers) went on to win the title. Of note: Eleven of those 13 teams played in the Eastern Conference, which has been both worse overall than the Western Conference over the last decade and specifically much worse in terms of scoring. The latter remains true this season; only four of the league’s top-15 offensive teams play in the East. The flip side: Of the league’s top 15 defenses, nine are in the East. That means East offenses might be a bit better than the stats show, because they are more regularly facing elite defenses. (The same is true, by the way, of West defenses, with their numbers artificially hurt by facing so many top-notch scoring clubs.)

Back to the big picture: Since 1998-99, only eight teams have made the conference finals with a defense that ranked outside the top 10. And if you have a shaky defense, you better have a ridiculously good offense; five of those eight clubs ranked first in points per possession and two others were second.

This is anecdotal, I realize, but all the evidence we have suggests the Bulls are on the right side of the offense/defense pendulum for playoff success.

There’s also this: The Bulls’ average margin of victory is +6.79, second to the Heat, according to Basketball-Reference. That is getting into pretty elite territory. Since the league added the three-point line in the 1979-80 season, only 69 teams have piled up an average margin of victory better than +6.5. Of those 69 teams, 32 made the Finals. The Bulls’ current margin would obviously rank toward the bottom of that list, but even so: Seven of the 15 teams on that list that finished with an average scoring margin between +6.5 and Chicago’s current mark made the Finals.

So: The big-picture indicators are really good. There is no logical reason to regard the Bulls as anything but a true championship contender, the equal or superior of any team in the NBA. The perception that they are “working too hard in the regular season” or may not “have another gear” is just that — a perception — and probably stems both from the fact that Derrick Rose has never gotten out of the first round and from the general view of Tom Thibodeau as a coach who demands perfection every night. As Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports noted, it was this perception of Thibodeau — the workaholic, too-demanding basketball junkie — that made teams wary of hiring the longtime assistant for the top job.

Now that notion may be bleeding over into how some folks think about the Bulls. Maybe they’re tired, or they’ve exerted themselves too much in March games that don’t mean much. Rose and Luol Deng have certainly played a ton of minutes, but both Carlos Boozer and Joakim Noah have missed so much time this season that they should be fresh for the playoffs.

And that defense? It may not need another gear. The Bulls have a chance to become only the sixth team since the league essentially banned hand-checking (before the 2004-05 season) to allow fewer than 100 points per 100 possessions, according to Basketball-Reference. And though that mark might exaggerate the Bulls’ stinginess a bit, no one is going to have an easy time scoring on them in the playoffs.