On a night when LeBron James makes only 10 of his 30 shots, Kyrie Irving makes only 2 of 10 and Iman Shumpert makes only 1 of 8, you can't lose to Cleveland. You have to take advantage of all that brick-laying, all that smothering defense, and push the Cavaliers to the brink of elimination. Yet the Chicago Bulls couldn't.

Two games, two shots by two former MVPs at the buzzer have given the NBA playoffs a new favorite series, something that now will keep coaches and players awake all night knowing the slim difference between 3-1 and 2-2 in a best-of-seven.

My first instinct is to call LeBron's game winner so much more than that, very possibly a championship shot, the bucket that's going to get the Cavaliers into the Eastern Conference finals ... and beyond.

Given John Wall's busted hand, the Hawks' creeping ordinariness, the Warriors' meeting their match and the Rockets' rather shocking meltdown, LeBron's shot quite possibly rearranged the playoffs. As difficult as it would have been for the Cavaliers to come from 3-1 down with Irving limping around badly, pulling even with the Bulls at 2-2 is a virtual series lead, with two of the final three games to be played in Cleveland.

Why? Because Timofey Mozgov is the best big man on the court now that Pau Gasol's hamstring has put him on the bench and because Joakim Noah struggles to hit the rim on a layup attempt. Talk about a dilemma for the Bulls. Noah is rebounding, blocking shots, taking charging fouls, challenging the Cavaliers in every conceivable way. His spirit is the team's spirit. But he can't make a layup; he just slams it off the top of the glass and the ball often doesn't hit the rim.

The Bulls execute wonderfully intricate plays to get Noah going with a simple layup and he can't make it, and not only is that repeated act a killer, but it's affecting Mike Dunleavy's offense, which was nonexistent Sunday because opposing defenses just tighten up on Dunleavy after Noah's handoffs.

Bulls big man Joakim Noah is struggling to contribute offensively. Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune/Getty Images

Throw that onto the general predictability of the Bulls' offense and they've got a mess on their hands. OK, the Bulls missed way too many open shots, particularly point-blank ones, but opposing players throughout the Eastern Conference, even ones who were/are in these playoffs, say they have the Bulls scouted to the T largely because they adhere so strictly to called plays.

"If the Bulls could avoid having all those six-, seven-minute scoring droughts they'd probably be the best team in the league, but they can't," one Eastern Conference veteran told me Sunday night. "And we all know every single thing they're going to run. ... Some nights they just execute at a level you can't stop, but you can't do that all the time in the playoffs, not against well-coached teams that lock in defensively."

Indeed, the 16-0 Cavaliers' run in the first half and the 16-2 run in the second half amounted to 32-2, and that, more than anything LeBron did in the final 1.5 seconds, took the game from the Bulls. "Too many duds for offensive possessions," is how Dunleavy put it, and that was kind. "We've had issues with that all year. Especially here in the playoffs, our ball movement has been slowing down and we kind of get stagnant."

Only 12 assists on 32 baskets for the Bulls in Game 4 tells you exactly how absent ball movement was.

As a result, since Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler are the Bulls' only true off-the-dribble creators on offense, everybody else has trouble scoring. Rose and Butler were the only Bulls to reach double digits Sunday. Dunleavy and Nikola Mirotic combined to miss 14 of 16 shots. Please, spare me from the coach-speak nonsense that the Bulls need to play better defense. They held the Cavaliers to 38.7 percent shooting, which is an A-plus effort on a night they played without their top rebounder and shot-blocker (Gasol), but could muster only 36 percent shooting themselves despite hitting an above-average 43 percent from 3-point range and committing a very respectable 12 turnovers.

The very first mission for the Bulls the rest of the series is to complete the essential objective in basketball, the thing they did so well in Game 1: make enough shots.

That's not to say Cleveland doesn't have issues. Irving can't walk. The list starts there. It's not his ankle, really; it's his foot, and there's very real pain in it. Irving wore such a grim look as he walked to the court for warm-ups Sunday it was clear he wasn't going to be anything close to the player who emerged this season playing with LeBron. And those of us who initially thought Irving would simply play through it Sunday and score 25 points were plain stupid. The playoffs have claimed a lot of casualties already, and Irving is one of them.

The Bulls ought to run Irving ragged with Rose and Aaron Brooks, making him cut and jump and do anything that renders him ineffective or in great pain. The Cavaliers have no real backup for Irving, just as the Grizzlies have no suitable backup for Mike Conley. They have to go after Irving, and any play-calling that doesn't take that into account is stubborn and wrong.

It wasn't James and Irving who beat the Bulls on Sunday, LeBron's game winner notwithstanding; it was Mozgov and J.R. Smith who killed them, very specifically Smith's 4-for-4 performance (including three 3-pointers) in the final quarter. You can't let role players, even guys with big roles like Mozgov and Smith, beat you in your gym on a night when the stars struggle as much as LeBron and Irving did.

It's a series with so many bizarre little twists and turns, even with as many as three games to go. David Blatt could have killed his team's chances all by himself by trying to call a timeout he didn't have that should have resulted in a Bulls technical foul shot in those final seconds, and with the dumbest-thing-you've-ever-heard idea to have LeBron throw the inbounds pass with 1.5 seconds left instead of receive it.

It was one of the truly shocking things to hear James say, in the moments after an enormous and dramatic win, "To be honest, the play that was drawn up, I scratched it."

LeBron James asked for the ball and delivered, winning Game 4 for the Cavs in the closing second. AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Changing the coach's play in the NBA isn't a big deal in the least. This isn't the NFL. Star players have as much power as head coaches and they change plays all the time, with or without telling the coach. It's just the open discussion of it postgame that was, well, a scream -- LeBron admitting he wasn't about to throw the inbounds pass. "Give me the damn ball and get out of the way," was the way several Cavaliers teammates remember LeBron's exact quote.

You wonder what kind of thick skin or sense of humor Blatt must have to get through this. Suppose LeBron had actually gone through with the play and we found out later Blatt had him as the inbounds man, tossing it to, say, Smith? Even Smith recounted part of the conversation in the huddle: "Coach drew up the play and we said, 'You sure?' And he said, 'Oh, maybe we need to switch that up.'"

The Bulls certainly would have preferred for it to work out that way, instead of LeBron reliving his earliest childhood basketball fantasies. What a weekend set, Games 3 and 4, Rose off glass and LeBron out of the corner, each for the win. If you think all the Little Boy has left these grown men, you're wrong. It brought smiles to many a face to hear LeBron say, "It's an unreal feeling," like when you're in the backyard as a tyke counting down, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ... you make the [buzzer] noise and everything."

The games weren't nearly as well played as Games 5, 6 or 7 of the Spurs-Clippers series. But the endgame drama, especially because it involved Rose and LeBron, probably was greater than anything in Spurs-Clippers, except Game 7.

The series has become not only dramatic, but exacting. LeBron stared longer than usual at the stat sheet, unable to accept a pair of weekend games where he shot nowhere near 40 percent, where he committed 15 turnovers and laid brick after brick from 3-point range. Somewhere in the staring, it seems he realized the combativeness of this series ain't stat-friendly. "I want to be efficient," he said, "but it's not happening right now."

Noah, for one, is likely thinking the same thing. It hasn't been pretty basketball, or efficient. The bodies and minds of players on both teams have taken too many clean shots for that, which is what sets the table in Games 5 and 6 for even more drama.