NBA Playoffs 2011: Heat-Bulls Game 2 Makes It a Good Old-Fashioned Series

The Game 2 showdown between the Miami Heat and Chicago Bulls featured some good old-fashioned basketball—the way they used to play it.

That one had a little bit of everything, didn’t it? Sure, no buzzer-beater, no dramatic ending, no questionable play-calling or controversial foul call in the waning minutes.

But somehow, it still had it all.

It had an underdog (on paper) facing an 0-2 deficit with vigor—and prevailing. It had some stars shining and others struggling. It had bench players coming through in big spots. It had defense—tough, physical defense.

It even had two fourth-quarter blood timeouts.

And it all happened in Chicago, one of the great NBA cities.

For the regular-season NBA-best Chicago Bulls, it was Taj Gibson, not Derrick Rose, who provided the fourth-quarter spark, scoring all eight of his points in the last frame on 4-of-7 shooting and doing it with a little vitality and style.

Rose, meanwhile, put up an unspectacular 21 points on just 7-of 21 shooting.

For the Miami Heat, some guy named Udonis Haslem, who wasn’t even a part of head coach Erik Spoelstra’s game plan heading into the game, came off the bench after an atrocious Heat first quarter and found youth and brought attitude, throwing down two momentum-swinging dunks and breaking out with 13 points in 23 minutes to accompany a marked impact on the defensive end.

And most of all, Game 2 had LeBron James doing what many have criticized him recently for not being able to do.

Finish.

James has been a fourth-quarter, late-game presence in the last two series. In Games 4 and 5 of the Boston Celtics series, games that could have gone either way towards the end, James tugged the scoreboard in Miami’s favor by hitting key three-pointers down the stretch.

But in Game 2 in Chicago—after Miami’s trio of James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were held scoreless in the first seven minutes of the fourth quarter, a combined 0-for-5 from the field—James figured it was time.

He shot with confidence late in the game, something we haven’t seen from him often in a Heat jersey, hitting a big three-pointer after the Bulls tied the game with a 17-6 run. He proceeded to score nine of his team’s last 12 points—all on jump shots, no easy buckets.

The result: A tie game with the crowd and palpable momentum pushing the hometown Bulls to a 2-0 series lead turned into a 10-point Heat victory on the road and a trip back to South Beach with a shiny new series tied at one apiece.

He finished the game with 29 points on 12-of-21 shooting with 10 boards and five assists, leading the team in all three categories.

And though he hasn’t exactly cemented his legacy as a true closer—that’ll take much more time and a championship, of course—James is certainly mixing the Quikrete to lay such a foundation as Miami Thrice and Co. push for a ring this season.

But there are still potentially five more games for Rose, Gibson and the mischievous neighborhood kids from Chicago to come along and mold their handprints in James’ driveway.

It was Heat team president Pat Riley who said a series doesn’t start until a team wins on the road.

You got it, Pat.