Bulls Take Game One

Very exciting game today. The Bulls did everything right, but still had a hard time closing things out, thanks to their lack of lowpost scoring (detailed in this post). However, no need to focus on the negative. Here were the Bulls heroes in Game One:

- Thabo Sefolosha. The man Henry Abbott of True Hoop calls "Swiss Mister" was fantastic today, locking up D Wade for long periods of time and even added 9 points and 4 boards in 17 minutes. Honestly, none of this comes as a huge surprise to me.

- Luol Deng dominated, as expected, with 33 and 8. He's really coming into his own and considering that James Posey is the only Heat player with any hope of guarding him, I expect plenty more where that came from.

- Ben Wallace had 14 rebounds, including the game-saver on a back tap at the end of the game. It seems like random lucky baskets really energize him these days; perhaps the Bulls should work that into the game plan.

- The referees really aided Chicago in this one, getting both Shaq (who was looking dominant early) and Wade into foul trouble - mostly on shaky charging calls and touch fouls. I'm pretty shocked that this happened.

- Then there is the team MVP of game one, Ben Gordon. Despite not having his shooting touch (7-for-19 and 0-for-5 from three), Gordon went for 24-11-7 while playing 43 minutes and taking over most of the point guard duties due to Hinrich's foul trouble. Terrific performance.