The Chicago Bulls have lost three of their last four. Derrick Rose was off his game in his return to the lineup Sunday. Things have been better.
But before we get too fixated on the momentary ups and downs that even the best NBA franchises go through, let's look back a moment and recognize one of the most impressive feats by a team—to be precise, by its bench—in league history.
The Bulls are Rose's team. Yet somehow, it hasn't mattered that he has been out for over a third of this season. While pundits and Bulls fans obsess about the status of Rose's toe, back and groin—injuries have benched him for 22 games so far—his teammates have helped power Chicago to a 43-14 record, best in the NBA.
With the playoffs starting later this month, this intensive focus on Rose is understandable. He almost single-handedly carried the Bulls to last year's Eastern Conference finals, where the Miami Heat dismissed them in five games.
But that's just the point. While last season's team was reliant on Rose—ultimately to its detriment—this year's edition isn't. What Chicago's backups and supporting cast have done in Rose's absence this season is arguably unprecedented in league history.
Rose's understudies at point guard, C.J. Watson and John Lucas III, helped engineer recent victories over five Eastern Conference playoff contenders, including a defeat of Miami last month. With Rose out, the Bulls boast a merely average offense—but still win by more points than any other team. With a Chicago-style toughness, they rebound with a vengeance—they rank first leaguewide in rebounding rate—and mount such a defensive stranglehold that in one game last month held the playoff-bound Orlando Magic to 59 points.
The Bulls even boast a Jeremy Lin-like character in Lucas, who spent most of his seven-year career overseas and in the NBA's Development League before earning a few starts this year thanks to Rose's injuries. Last month against the Heat—a team that cut him in 2009—the 5-foot-11 Lucas scored a career-high 24 points, including nail-in-the-coffin jumper over a startled LeBron James. Chicago fans have taken to calling him Carlton, after the diminutive high achiever in television's Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
"A lot of people doubted whether we could get the job done with (Rose) out," says Lucas, adding that such doubt "lights a fire under you."
Chicago's backups call themselves the "Bench Mob," and they've made up for injuries all across the team's starting lineup. Starting shooting guard Rip Hamilton, for instance, has missed 38 games because of ailments. Chicago's starters have played only 11 games together this season (winning nine).
"We're kind of boring," said reserve Ronnie Brewer, who has often started in Hamilton's place. "We're a quiet, lunch-pail kind of group that doesn't warrant a lot of attention."
Yet this bench-warming bunch is on the cusp of accomplishing something historic. No team boasting the reigning MVP has improved its record while losing that star for a large chunk of games. The Bulls just might: Their win percentage this season stands at .754, just shy of their league-best .756 last year.
To be sure, Chicago is better with Rose. But its record without him is 15–7 (.682), a win percentage superior to every other conference foe except Miami.
Without Rose, the Bulls score four fewer points per game, but try hard to improve upon what many view as already the NBA's best defense. "Defensively we try to make it a nightmare when we're out there," said small forward Kyle Korver.
For long stretches this year, the Bulls lineup has featured only one starter, Luol Deng, along with Lucas, Korver and defensive stalwarts Taj Gibson and center Omer Asik. That group has played in 25 games together, and here's why: It limits opponents to just 77.5 points per 100 possessions while outscoring them by 32.4 points in that span, according to Stats LLC. By that metric, that lineup not only outperforms Chicago's starting five. It outperforms the entire league.
The performance of Chicago's bench has stunned many who saw no hope for the Bulls sans Rose. "I was one of those guys," TNT analyst Kenny Smith acknowledged. "I didn't know they were that good."
Of course, the most important test lies ahead, when a successful march through the postseason will almost certainly require greater support than Rose received during last year against Miami. He made less than a third of his shots in the Bulls' four defeats that series, yet was taking 25 shots per contest in those games—five more than his regular-season average.
Yet to some extent, bench play in the playoffs this season could be more of a factor than in the past. That is because the lockout-shortened 66-game schedule has teams playing about four games per week instead of three, which has slightly increased the injury rate. Over the first month and a half of the season, there were more than nine new injuries per day—up from seven per day during the 2010 and 2011 campaigns, according to Doug VanDerwerken, a Duke Ph.D. student who researched the topic for the analysis site teamrankings.com.
There are precedents for strong benches contributing to championships: the 1960s' Celtics, for example, and the Lakers and Pistons of the 1980s. On each of those benches, however, sat a future Hall of Famer.
Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau attributes the spectacular play of his bench this year to heavy use of those players last season, when injuries sidelined starters Carlos Boozer and Joakim Noah, among others. "All the injuries we had last year prepared us well for having to play without Derrick this year," said the raspy voiced Thibodeau, who's favored to win the league's coach-of-the-year award for an unprecedented second straight season.
Now that Rose is back—on Sunday he made his first start since March 12—his teammates face an unlikely challenge: trying to re-establish chemistry with the star they were brought in to complement. In Sunday's overtime loss to the Knicks, Rose shot 31%, had a season-high eight turnovers and acknowledged afterward that he was "getting into rhythm." Even so, he led the Bulls with 29 points.
As Chicago heads into the homestretch and into the playoffs, all eyes will be on Rose. But the team's role players know the postseason could depend on them—just as the regular season did. Said Watson: "We'll have a chance to prove that he's not out there doing it by himself."
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