Bulls’ Fans Slowly Returning

Go to a Chicago Bulls’ game, and it’s beginning to look like the good old days.

The United Center is rocking, with loud, passionate fans packing every last seat. Even that third level of boxes, so high up in the rafters they may as well be on the roof, are occupied. Team gear is back in fashion, too. There’s no shame in busting out that Bulls’ sweatshirt, and it’s OK to replace an old-school Michael Jordan jersey with something a little more current.

After six years of mind-numbing futility, where the only thing left to play for at this time of year was avoiding last place, the Bulls have come roaring back. With one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the NBA, Chicago is on the verge of making the playoffs for the first time since 1998.

“The Bulls are so much fun to watch,” said Mark Grogan, who brought his 12-year-old daughter, Eileen, and 10-year-old son, Patrick, to Tuesday night’s game. “People are really excited.”

And, let’s be honest, a little stunned.

The Bulls have been abysmal since Jordan and friends won the last of Chicago’s six NBA titles. They lost 341 games from 1999 to 2004, so inept they made even the Clippers look good. They’re on their third coach since Phil Jackson left, and so many players have come and gone they could form their own league.

So when the Bulls began the year 0-9, matching the franchise record for worst start, even some of the players thought, “Here we go again.”

“I will admit I had that feeling,” Tyson Chandler said. “But after we started winning, I knew we would consistently do so.”

The turning point came Nov. 24, when the Bulls beat the Utah Jazz. Not only was it their first win, but it stopped Chicago’s 37-game, six-year losing streak on its annual November trip.

“When we won that game, that gave us some confidence,” rookie Ben Gordon said. “We got our first win in so-and-so years. That was something positive to build off of.”

The Bulls won five straight in mid-December, their longest winning streak since Jordan’s last season. They were 20-8 from Jan. 1 to March 1, second-best in the NBA behind only the defending champion Detroit Pistons.

With 29 victories heading into the weekend, they already had surpassed last year’s win total and were just one victory shy of matching their high-water mark in the post-Jordan era. If the season ended today, they’d be the sixth seed in the playoffs.

Granted, the East is weak. But Chicago went 11-4 against Western Conference teams after that ugly November trip. Included in that collection was the team’s first win in Dallas in eight years, and its first sweep of the Minnesota Timberwolves since the 1996-97 season.

“Even though we started off losing, it wasn’t the same kind of losing that we had been doing the past three years and I definitely felt ... we still would, at some point, turn things around,” Eddy Curry said. “Kind of hard to say I thought we’d be where we are now, but I definitely felt that we were moving in the right direction.”

The Bulls didn’t have much of an identity or a plan when General Manager John Paxson took over, with players never really sure of their role. Paxson kept prep-to-pro projects Chandler and Curry, and shed anyone who wasn’t a tenacious, defensive-minded player.

He picked up Kirk Hinrich in his first draft, then hit upon a bonanza last summer. In addition to taking Gordon with the No. 3 pick, he traded for Luol Deng, the seventh pick. He added Chris Duhon and signed Andres Nocioni, who’d spent the last two years playing in Spain before helping Argentina win gold at the Athens Olympics.

Paxson also dumped high-priced long-term contracts to give the Bulls salary-cap flexibility.

“Nobody’s ever had a place here, as far as knowing what you’ve got to come in and do,” Chandler said. “Now I feel we’ve put together a nucleus that each guy has his individual thing that’s making us win.”

It starts with defense. The Bulls didn’t allow 100 points for 26 straight games from Dec. 4 to Jan. 24, and are holding opponents to 42.2 percent shooting, second best in the NBA. They’re sixth in the league in scoring defense.

On offense, Curry, Hinrich, Gordon and Deng all average in double figures. Gordon (14.6) and Deng (12.2) rank second and third among rookies, and Gordon is fifth in the NBA in 3-point percentage (44.7).

Gordon is generating some star power, too, thanks to his knack for monster fourth quarters. He has had double-figure fourth quarters in 16 games so far, most of any player in the NBA. Yes, more than Shaq, LeBron, even Kobe.

“I told him he might as well just stay in the locker room and we’ll just get a buzzer for him for the fourth quarter,” Chandler joked. “He’ll run out and rip off his cape and get the crowd going.”

Some fans have even dubbed him Ben ‘Rhymes with Jordan’ Gordon.

“It’s flattering, but I try to block that out,” Gordon said. “I shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence as him. I know fans don’t mean anything and they’re just having fun. But as a player, you have so much respect for a guy like that. I kind of just want to shy away from that.”