Start Me Up
To no one's surprise, the Bulls have tinkered with their starting lineup. I think essentially the moves they have made in shuffling the lineup a bit have several goals. As Scott Skiles has said, one of them is to get Ben Gordon back on track. Ben has had two really big games and four other games where he has really struggled. Tuesday night, Ben played a pretty good ballgame in Dallas coming off the bench. They are just trying to get him on track because it appears he has been, for the most part, out of rhythm this season. In the games we've had on WGN, it looks like the offense itself has been out of rhythm. Now that could be the rotations or the many different players who are getting significant minutes right now as Scott tries to figure out the best rotation. I know that Scott would like to tighten that rotation a bit so that the roles are more defined. All of this has probably led to the inconsistency we've seen so far on the offense.
Furthermore what has been a chronic malady for this team so far is the fact that they have been getting off to slow starts in their games. This is another thing Scott wants to change. He needs to get a little more punch early in the ballgame - that's not the reason Gordon isn't starting. He wants to get Ben on track by bringing him off the bench and take some of the pressure off him that way by playing against somebody's second unit player instead of the starter. They inserted Andres Nocioni into the starting lineup in place of PJ Brown to get a little more energy into the starting unit and allow the bench to feature Gordon's scoring and PJ's defense to see how that type of rotation might work.
This is not unexpected. This is something we thought would happen with the new faces on the roster. As I've mentioned before it's a work in progress in November and into December. We knew it would take some time before they would find their rhythm offensively, both as individuals when we talk about Ben Gordon, and as a team when you are talking about the Bulls offense.
Wayne