lessthanjake wrote:I think it mostly just comes down to the fact that sometimes a team isn’t in its best form in the playoffs. For most great teams, they don’t win a title in those years. But Jordan and the Bulls were so good that the team not being in the best form just resulted in the title being less easy than normal.
Of course, it doesn’t help that they faced good opponents.
The Blazers were a genuinely really good team that had averaged 7.30 SRS in a three-year span. Beating them in six games was honestly about what you’d expect, and I don’t regard this as an underperformance. So it’s really about the earlier series.
The Knicks had a great defense and probably were a better team than their record and SRS would suggest (and they did do better in those regards in the next couple seasons), but it was still a bit surprising that they took the Bulls to 7 games and IMO that did in part reflect the Bulls not playing their best. Another factor with the Knicks series is that teams that are inferior but have really good defense can often slow the pace down a lot and thereby make close games more likely and then hope to squeak by through winning close games. That’s essentially what the Knicks did. The pace of the series was a glacial 83.1 (in a league context that hadn’t gotten particularly slow yet), and the Knicks were outscored by a good bit overall but took it to 7 games in large part by winning a couple close low-scoring games. It’s a good strategy for an overmatched team to take (because the fewer possessions there are, the more random the result will be, and therefore the higher the overmatched team’s chances of victory). And it came somewhat close to working, even though the Bulls were suited well for slow-pace games. So, basically, with the Knicks I think it came down to a combination of the Bulls not playing their best and the Knicks having a good strategy to try to grind the series out against a stronger opponent.
Dropping two games to the Cavaliers was a bit of an underperformance from the Bulls, IMO. The Cavaliers were a 5.34 SRS team and winning in six games is relatively comfortable, but it was pretty close for a six-game series, and I think the Bulls were good enough to beat those Cavs in 4 or 5 games. So I think the Bulls taking six games to beat the Cavs was reflective of the Bulls not being in their best form.
Ultimately, the end result of this was still a title, but I do think if the 1992 Bulls had been in the type of playoff form that most of the other Bulls title teams were in in the playoffs, they probably would’ve dropped 2-4 fewer playoff games that year. A team isn’t going to be in its best form in the playoffs every year though. The way dynasties happen is when a team is so far above the other teams that it can underperform in the playoffs and still win the title. That’s what happened with the 1992 Bulls.
Oddly enough a weaker Bulls team in '93 had less trouble with both the Cavs and Knicks in the playoffs, and that's despite the latter being the No. 1 seed and having homecourt advantage. Even with the 0-2 hole, the Bulls didn't need to go the distance with the Knicks in '93 like they did in '92. And in '93 the Cavs couldn't even manage to take one game from the Bulls.