The NBA playoffs are really heating up.............and it is good to see a return of a former MVP who has had injury problems.....................a civil rights victory would smell even sweeter than a Rose..............

Bulls eliminate Bucks with historic 54-point beatdown, move on to face Cavs

 

By Dan Devine10 hours agoBall Don't Lie

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Coming off two straight losses that turned an expected sweep into a surprisingly tense affair, we wondered how the Chicago Bulls would respond in Thursday's Game 6. Would they continue to struggle with the Milwaukee Bucks' length, athleticism and grit? Or would they stop messing around and take Jason Kidd's young Bucks to school?

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Our answer came quickly, as the Bulls made their first three shots to jump out to an 8-0 lead after just 68 seconds. It came decisively, as Chicago opened up an 11-point lead less than five minutes into the game, and led by 18 after the first quarter.

It came repeatedly, as Chicago unleashed the full force of its fury on the stunned and outgunned Bucks. The Bulls never trailed Thursday, leading by at least 20 points for the final 33 minutes and 52 seconds of game time en route to a 120-66 annihilation that gave the Bulls a 4-2 win in their best-of-seven series. After ending the Bucks' season with extreme prejudice, Chicago now advances to a long-awaited second-round meeting with LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Chicago's 54-point win marks the largest margin of victory in a series-clinching victory in NBA playoff history, and the third-largest margin of victory in any playoff game. It is the second-biggest blowout win in Bulls history, trailing only a 56-point pasting of the Portland Trail Blazers back in 1976.

It is the most lopsided loss the Bucks have ever suffered, topping a pair of 48-point defeats. Their 66 points were a franchise playoff low. And somehow, that's not even the worst of it:

Oh, man. That just hurts your heart.

This performance represented something close to the platonic ideal of the 2014-15 Bulls — the sort of two-way thrashing that, purely in a theoretical sense, we suspected Tom Thibodeau's full squad might be capable of laying down on an unsuspecting opponent.

They haven't done this type of thing often, due in part to multiple injuries resulting in the Bulls' preferred starting lineup — Pau Gasol, Joakim Noah, Mike Dunleavy, Jimmy Butler and Derrick Rose — making only 21 appearances for just 353 regular-season minutes. Chicago went 16-5 in those games, with that five-man unit scoring at a top-five level of offensive efficiency and topping its opposition by a strong 3.7 points per 100 possessions, the same amount the Cavs managed over the course of the full season.

So, yeah, the Bulls have been good when they've had all their guys. But this? This was something else.