Chicago Bulls Skin Milwaukee Bucks in Home Away from Home

The Chicago Bulls temporarily took possession of the Bradley Center, making it United Center II tonight as they hunted, skinned and roasted the Milwaukee Bucks 113-90. 

The big news was Deng big news, as in Luol Deng playing. He anchored the defense. He scored. He rebounded. He was Glue-All. His 21 points and nine boards were nice, but if there's a player in the NBA that can't be measured by stats, it's Deng. 

The defense was back in large part because of Deng. The recent trend of giving up easy points in the paint dissolved as the Bulls outscored the Bucks 50-42 in the paint and held Milwaukee to .398 from the field. 

That has a lot to do with Deng locking down on defense. Tonight, though, Derrick Rose also gets a ton of credit for his defensive job on Brandon Jennings, who didn't score at all until late in the third quarter and ended the game with just eight points. 

Rose, who as of late has taken his game to another level—even for him—scored 26 points, adding 13 assists and seven rebounds.

In his last two games, Rose has scored or assisted on 116 of the Bulls' 216 total points. Over his last five games, he's averaged 29 points and 9.2 assists. 

Joakim Noah had another solid game, scoring 14 points and nine boards. He is now averaging 11.8 points and 11.2 boards over his last eight games since he came back form injury. 

It was hard to tell who had the home-court "advantage" tonight. Several times when they tried to get the "Let's go Bucks" chant started, the "Bulls" chants drowned out the "Bucks" chants. When Rose scored 13 points early in the first quarter, the MVP chants were booming through the arena.

Even the Scalabrine chants were enthusiastically felt, and satisfied. Red shirts seemed to outnumber the green ones fairly easily. 

It's gotta be bad for Milwaukee to have the other team get more cheers than they do. 

The Bulls fans probably won't travel quite as well to New Jersey, where the Bulls dropped a game last season before they acquired Deron Williams.

The Bulls played their league-leading 16th road game tonight, and won their league-leading 11th, but they still have four more to go before they end this road trip. They have also played the most games in the NBA (26) and have won a league-high 20. 

On the bright side, the New Jersey game will put them over the halfway point for road games this season, and by the time this trip is over, the Bulls will have nearly played two-thirds of their total road games for the year. 

That means that all those things balance out after they get back. They'll be playing more games at home, getting better rested and getting healthier. If they come out of this road trip with the best record in the East, it will hard to take away the top seed from them. 

Follow @KellyScaletta