NBA
Chicago Bulls Beat Miami Heat Behind Unsustainable Defense
Miami's .442 eFG% has less than a 10 percent chance of happening in any given game.

Somewhere near the United Center, Patrick Kane hands his Key to the City over to actual mayor.

It's easy to wax poetic about Chicago's Game 1 win in Miami; it's even easier because I'm sitting in a Chicago apartment a 15 minute bus ride away from the United Center as I type this. For a city that didn't expect much from the red jerseys this season, their enthusiasm for the team is positively infectious. And that enthusiasm may just come about because the Bulls are winning the same way as the Bears of old: defense, defense, and more defense.

Even without November loss to the Grizzlies in which they shot .440 eFG% as a team, saw upset, saw LeBron go 14 for 31 and Wade for 6 for 20.

But those types of shooting performances won't happen too often - LeBron finished the regular season with a second-in-the-NBA .603 eFG%, while Wade's .528 eFG% wasn't half bad himself. Even against the Chicago Bulls, who held opponents to a fourth-best .477 eFG% this season, LeBron and Wade wouldn't be expected to shoot that poorly except in the most extreme outlier.

Let's call last night that type of outlier. Neither player managed to get above a .500 eFG%; the only Heat player to do so was Norris Cole who went 3 of 4 from the field. The Heat as a team only made 7 of 24 threes (.105 percentage points below their season average), and Chicago outshot them by .044 despite coming in with the next-to-last regular season offensive eFG% when fully healthy.

The analytics say last night's Heat output was an extreme outlier. Given a league-average opponent, the Heat should only shoot .442 eFG% or below 7.1 percent of the time. The Bulls' tough defense may bump that percentage up slightly, but not nearly enough to take last night's performance out of outlier status.

So What Does It Mean?

Well, to answer the bold lettering, it means very little. The Bulls may have bumped their series victory chances slightly, but even in a 1-0 hole, it's still the Heat who hold the major advantage.

4 Games5 Games6 Games7 GamesTotal Win Odds
Miami0.00%21.72%25.12%26.45%73.29%
Chicago3.10%5.25%10.92%7.44%26.71%

As it stands, the Heat still hold a roughly 47 percent chance (nearly half!) of winning this series in six games or less. The Bulls, meanwhile, barely hold over one-quarter odds of winning the series, even with the 1-0 lead. There is a greater percentage chance that Miami wins the next four games than there is of Chicago winning in six games or less.

Chicago's Game 1 win was nice and all, but from the number's vantage point, it looks a lot like an outlier. Sorry to burst your bubble, Bulls fans. A poor Miami shooting night like that one is unlikely to happen again, so sayeth the stats.

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