The Bulls' Second Quarter: Pretty much what we expected?

As best as I can tell, the Bulls got to the 33 games mark before any other team in the league. And considering a majority of the predictions I saw largely had some variation of a Miami-Oklahoma City prediction for this year's NBA Finals, perhaps it isn't all that surprising the Heat and the Thunder sit atop the conferences right now.

Of course, Chicago had been occupying that top spot in the East all the way up until yesterday's stunning loss to the otherwise fairly woeful New Jersey Nets. The Bulls' 11-5 record during this last stretch isn't terrible by any means, but there's also not much arguing that no loss, no game, was more important of those last 16 than the 97-93 Heat victory over the Bulls in Miami.

Go ahead, if you'd like, and tell yourself that winning so many other games helps numb the pain a little bit. Or that it was just one of four meetings with that team this year. Luol Deng wasn't even playing, after all.

Still, the game was there to be won. Derrick Rose, at the foul line, couldn't get either one of his attempts to fall. Brutal. And perhaps you can hope that maybe another group stuns the Heat early along the way in the playoffs, but it seems far safer (saner?) to me to admit that all roads for all teams will require going through Miami for an NBA Championship.

So the Bulls remain in front of the rest of the teams in the Central, and only Indiana seems destined to be a playoff participant. The Bucks may make a run at the eighth spot, but would need a real collapse from one of the other eight contenders in addition to an unbelievable finish on their own part.

As for the rest of the league, it seems as though the Mavericks have been showing more signs that give me a little more reason to believe they can help me not look so foolish for picking them at the beginning of this season. However, the team that's been looking perhaps most dangerous to the aforementioned contenders already mentioned would probably be the San Antonio Spurs. Maybe dismissed too easily by the same critics that always seems to favor the athletic youths over the aging veterans, we should probably not forget that Gregg Popovich led the same franchise to a championship the last time a regular season was shortened. That should probably count for something, but don't tell my girlfriend fiancee that I said that.

For the Bulls, there's still a lot to be concerned about as it relates to the back issues that have forced Derrick Rose to miss a number of games this season. While the view is certainly a lot more optimistic as a whole for the team than I might be tending to indicate in this write-up, to this fan, the Bulls are not a team that looks unbeatable by any means. And like I said, coming off a rather discouraging loss to the Nets in which Chicago fell behind 22-3 to start the game, I'm probably letting that slow start affect my overall evaluation of the team's chances at this point. Still, maybe some big wins in this next quarter (no need to mention names, I trust) can have me a little more enthusiastic about prospects by the end of the third quarter.