The Chicago-Indiana Five-Game Shoving Match Is Finally Over

The Pacers-Bulls series, now mercifully complete after Chicago did what they should have done all along and put together a 27-point victory last night, regressed into a shoving, name-calling match with one ejection and two technical fouls in Game 5. After the game, Danny Granger called out Joakim Noah for his "cowardly" cheap shots against Indiana players, and Pacers coach Frank Vogel conceded that "[i]n this series, everyone got an elbow in the throat."

This evidently supports the notion that the NBA postseason "is all about hard fouls." That's not really true; the NBA postseason is all about getting treated to the kind of play everyone would like to see during the regular season, and those hard fouls seem to go hand-in-hand with more spirited defensive play. Josh McRoberts' ejection, above, seems more a symptom of brink-of-elimination frustration than anything else, though — and one can imagine that guarding Joakim Noah for three quarters will inspire, at the very least, a shove.

Kyle Korver said after the game that "there's going to be hard fouls" in the playoffs. He continued: "Jo's one of those guys, when you're not on his team he pisses you off... He's like Jeff Foster. When he's on your team, you love him. When he's on the other team, you hate him. And that's one of the special things about Jo."

One of many.

Danny Granger rips Joakim Noah [ESPN] Bulls get best of a way-too-physical series [Chicago Sun-Times] Bulls thriving in rough-and-tumble world of NBA playoffs [NBA.com]

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