Chicago Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau has turned in perhaps the finest initial three-year run as head coach as anyone we’ve seen in modern NBA history, but for the one massive caveat that points to the series of players to whom he’s given court time despite their suffering from significant injuries. Because Tom recently indirectly copped to past mistakes with All-Star center Joakim Noah, though, we were ready to move on and credit the man for turning a corner when it came to minute allotment.

Then the team’s general manager Gar Forman had to try to explain things away to the Chicago Sun-Times' Joe Cowley. After quoting an “NBA official” that we’re super-sure is in no way affiliated with the Bulls as calling attacks on Thibodeau a “witch hunt,” Forman went into this explanation:

Before becoming the Bulls’ coach, he was an assistant with the Boston Celtics, who were one of the first NBA franchises to embrace basketball analytics. General manager Gar Forman is quick to point out that the Bulls have an analytics department and that minutes played in correlation with injuries is studied. ‘‘It’s hard to generalize,’’ Forman said. ‘‘Different players’ minutes will affect [things in] different ways, so it’s hard to generalize that assumption in whole. We have studied that. I mean, different body types, different years, how many years you’ve played, the age, all those things are factored in.’’ […] And from everything the Bulls have come up with, they are fully behind how Thibodeau hands out playing time. ‘‘In our scenario, Tom paces the team throughout the year, and we think he does a good job at that,’’ Forman said.

It’s true that this is your “scenario.” It’s also true that this is truly, unabashedly incorrect.

Thibodeau did pace Noah down the stretch of the season, when Noah was incapable of playing due to his plantar fasciitis injury, but that was because he had little choice. Little choice, after playing his center a ridiculous 39.2 minutes per game from October to the start of the 2013, and “easing off” while tossing him out there for 37.4 minutes per game in January and February. A February that saw Noah miss three games to start the month, so as to attend to a plantar fasciitis injury that doesn’t get better after taking three games off and then playing 392 minutes spread out over 10 games. Which is exactly what happened to Noah after he returned from his stint in street clothes.

Worse, if the Bulls did commit to a significant analytics department, they would see that Noah’s minutes per game are unlike those of any other player in the NBA. An ESPN Insider column from Tom Haberstroh from earlier this month details as much:

Noah, who ranks 14th in minutes per game, ran a staggering 2.74 miles per game under the SportVU lens. No one has covered more distance than the high-energy center on a game-to-game basis — and that includes Luol Deng, who leads the NBA in minutes per game with a 38.9 figure. Deng actually came in second with 2.68 miles run per game. Something tells me that Tom Thibodeau won't be satisfied until the top five consists of all Bulls players.

Now, that’s the 14th-ranked Noah after a series of fits and starts that led from him dropping from second to 14th in minutes per game once the plantar fasciitis injury hit.

As Haberstroh mentions, these numbers came from utilizing the SportVU camera technology that 15 out of 30 NBA teams use to analyze their players and opponents. The Bulls, as you’d expect, are not one of those teams — despite ranking as one of the league’s more profitable franchises for a quarter of a century. Seems like an analytics department addition, to use the phrase Forman signed off on, worth sussing out.

So what does this technology tell us? It points out that a 35-minute night from Joakim Noah is unlike a 35-minute night from any other player in the NBA, because he strides up and down the court more than anyone else. And that’s barely getting into his stop/start work within Thibodeau’s brilliant half-court defense, a defense that relies on Noah above all to smartly hedge on any intruders while being able to dash back to the interior to contest a potential close shot and/or grab a rebound.

What you have here is the perfect storm. Noah’s minutes are the most wearing minutes of any player in the NBA — and frankly, this is obvious from an eye test, and eschewing something like SportVU. He was coming off of a significant ankle sprain from last spring as he entered 2011-12, and he has suffered from plantar fasciitis in the past. For those that are unaware, dealing with and “overcoming” plantar fasciitis is like overcoming an addiction. You may be clean for a decade and a half, but you’re always an addict. It’s always in you. And Noah’s run of minutes per game in November and December as akin to locking an addict in a penthouse suite with an endless supply of comped 12-year-old scotch, an eight-ball, and enough hotel matchbooks to make it through those three cartons of Lucky Strikes stacked atop the bar. And the only water bottle available costs nine bucks.

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