The best teams in the league don’t enjoy losing, and they especially don’t take well to getting blown out at home by a team it doesn’t believe is up to that task.
Chicago came into Madison Square Garden on Friday and used its trademark defense to obliterate the team at the top of the Eastern Conference standings. Behind 29 points and 13 rebounds from Luol Deng, to go along with 15 points, 12 rebounds, and six assists from Joakim Noah, the Bulls not only won in New York by a final of 110-106, but got under the Knicks’ collective skin in the process.
It was only New York’s second home loss on the season, but it was also the team’s second home loss in its last three games.
Chicago came out and stifled the Knicks offense from the start, getting out to a 15-point halftime lead after limiting New York to just 39 first-half points, while shutting down the Knicks’ trademark three-point attack by holding them to just 2-of-12 shooting in the first two quarters from distance.
The Bulls are an extremely tough team to deal with when facing a large deficit as the Knicks were on Friday, and as a result, New York’s players and coaches were unable to contain their collective frustration as the game continued to be out of reach.
J.R. Smith had 26 points in just under 32 minutes of action before fouling out with just over seven minutes to play. His leaving was legitimate, but with the Knicks trailing by 15 late and the game becoming more and more likely to end in the Bulls’ favor, the dominoes started to fall.
Carmelo Anthony was the next to go, getting ejected 15 seconds later for arguing a foul call with the officials. Tyson Chandler and the Bulls’ Noah were ejected a few minutes later for one of those confrontations where no one was going to throw a punch, but the posturing and the words exchanged left the officials with no choice but to rid the game of the players involved.
Knicks head coach Mike Woodson also was ejected, with the game clearly out of hand and the officials losing control, at least to a certain extent.
The referees weren’t the reason the Knicks found themselves on the wrong end of this one, of course, but the game wasn’t exactly one of the best officiated on the young season.
No, 17 turnovers and a low shooting percentage to go along with a sluggish start are what doomed the Knicks on this night. But the ugly way in which the team handled its performance, by having multiple players and its head coach ejected in the final period when things weren’t going their way was a less than professional way to go out, and not exactly indicative of a team that’s ready to handle the pressures associated with being one of the league’s elite.