Ben Wallace

Ben Wallace pounds boards with 27 rebounds to lead Bulls over Bucks 117 111

Ben Wallace and the Chicago Bulls controlled the paint again.

Wallace grabbed a season-high 27 rebounds and added 10 points to lead Chicago to a 117-111 victory over the Milwaukee Bucks on Friday night.

Kirk Hinrich scored 21 points and Chris Duhon had 19 points for Chicago, which has won 10 of its last 11 games.

Wallace backed up a 20-rebound performance against Seattle on Wednesday and was just one short of his career high.

``That's what we have to do. We've got to get back to playing defence,'' Wallace said. ``Especially, we have to take care of our basket.

``We can't allow guys to walk down the lane and get layups. The starters and everyone who came off the bench did a great of the protecting the basket.''

Ruben Patterson had 21 points and 13 rebounds for the Bucks, finishing three assists shy of his first career triple-double. Michael Redd led the Bucks with 32 points, after he was held to a season-low nine in a loss to New Jersey on Wednesday.

Chicago finished its longest homestand in team history with a 7-1 record and improved to 9-0 against Eastern Conference teams at the United Center.

``Before the season, that's what we wanted to do, be a great home team. It was one of our goals,'' Duhon said. ``The last two years we have not played well at home, this year I think everybody is making a conscious effort to come out and bring the necessary energy for us to win.''

Milwaukee closed to within three points with a 16-6 run, capped by Patterson's follow with 3:44 left, but Chicago answered with Wallace's dunk and two free throws by Ben Gordon.

Mo Williams hit a jumper to cut the Chicago lead to 110-108, but Wallace came back with a nice assist to Tyrus Thomas for a dunk to put the Bulls up four with 1:06 left.

Thomas then blocked Brian Skinner's shot attempt. Thomas finished with 14 points and 10 rebounds. Wallace also had six assists for Chicago.

Thomas and Wallace gave the Bulls a 59-43 rebound advantage over the Bucks.

``We had to get every loose ball, every rebound, we just had to get everything,'' Thomas said.

Williams converted a three-point play with 24 seconds left to cut the Chicago lead to 112-111. The Bucks put Gordon on the line, and he made both. Chicago made 35-of-41 free throws, while Milwaukee was just 16-of-34.

``I'm surprised we were in the game. Wow. That's almost 20 (missed) free throws. Wow. I mean, wow, wow. If we make 10 of those we win easy,'' Williams said.

Leading 78-76, Chicago pulled away in the third quarter with an 8-1 run. Wallace kept an offensive possession alive with a rebound and Duhon followed with a jumper. Then after two free throws by Duhon, Wallace found rookie Thomas for an alley-oop dunk on a break to give the Bulls an 86-77 lead late in the third quarter.

Patterson came into the game shooting 66 per cent from the line. He missed his first six free throws and finished 3-for-10.

Wallace tied the game 55-55 with a putback as time expired in the second quarter. He scored eight points and had 15 rebounds in the first half.

``Tyrus Thomas and Ben Wallace are a factor,'' Bucks coach Terry Stotts said. ``They changed shots, blocked shots.

``That all said, we missed a lot of easy ones around the basket. Maybe they had something to do with that.''

The Bulls led by as many as 13 points in the first quarter, but allowed Milwaukee to come back and take the lead temporarily by committing eight turnovers in the second. Milwaukee shot 63 per cent in the period and Steve Blake scored 12 points off the bench in the half, all coming in the second quarter. Redd had 18 points at halftime.

Notes: Wallace had 28 rebounds two times in his career . . . Before the game, the Bulls honoured Lamar Hunt with a moment of silence. In 1967, Hunt was one of 10 original founding partners in the Bulls basketball franchise. He was the last remaining original owner. He died Wednesday . . . Bulls F P.J. Brown missed the game with a strained right foot.

Wallace's season high 15 points, 20 rebounds help Bulls trample Sonics 99 84

Ben Wallace is starting to fit in with the Chicago Bulls.

The former Detroit star had a season-high 15 points and 20 rebounds to lead the Bulls to a 99-84 victory over the Seattle SuperSonics on Wednesday night.

Ben Gordon added 27 points and Andres Nocioni had 20 points in Chicago's ninth victory in 10 games. Wallace also had five blocked shots, tying his season high.

``Anytime you leave a situation like I was in, coming to something new, I was in Detroit for six years and to take on a new challenge at this point in my career there is always going to be a little bit of an adjustment,'' said Wallace, who was benched earlier during a game for disobeying team rules and wearing a headband. ``For the most part I think the transition has gone pretty smooth.''

Bulls coach Scott Skiles wants Wallace to be part of the offence.

``We throw Ben the ball quite a bit in the course of games,'' Skiles said. ``Tonight, he saw some openings and took them and scored.

``It is silly to say he had a big game, he had 20 rebounds, but that was a big time performance.''

The Sonics played without Ray Allen and Earl Watson. Allen, who was not with the team, missed his fifth straight game because of a bone bruise in his right foot, while Earl Watson suited up but didn't play because of a lower back contusion.

Chicago jumped out to a 28-12 lead, with Nocioni scoring seven points and Luol Deng adding eight. Wallace had five points, seven rebounds and three blocks in the quarter.

The Bulls beat the Sonics at home for the first time since 1997-98, when they won their sixth championship in Michael Jordan's final season with the team. Prior to Wednesday night, Chicago had dropped eight straight to the Sonics at the United Center.

Rashard Lewis scored 18 points for the Sonics, and Damien Wilkins added 16 points.

``Our bigs were foul trouble. Our bigs didn't really play that much tonight,'' Lewis said. ``With Ben Wallace out there, it's hard to keep him off the glass.''

Deng finished with 13 points, and Kirk Hinrich had 14 points and eight assists.

Notes: The Bulls played without P.J. Brown, sidelined by a right foot injury. He's listed as day-to-day . . . Chicago is 2-7 against Western Conference teams . . . Alfonso Soriano, who agreed to a US$136-million, eight-year contract with the Chicago Cubs, attended the game and got a loud ovation from the fans when he was shown on the video board as did Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks. But the biggest ovation of the night went to Devin Hester, the star returner for the Chicago Bears . . . Sonics F Johan Petro finished with 16 points and 10 rebounds.

Headband lifted, Bulls centre Big Ben Wallace chimes in at last

Now that the Bulls put all that silliness behind them and made Ben Wallace take off the headband, it's time they faced up to the real problem.

That would be the one between his ears.

We already know what Wallace can do when he's happy. He proved that again Tuesday night against New York, providing a little grit and a lot of energy as the Bulls completed a home-and-home sweep of the fast-fading Knicks. What remains to be seen is whether he and coach Scott Skiles can be happy at the same time.

For the first three weeks of a contract that will pay him US$60 million over the next four years, Wallace played _ and maybe worse, behaved _ like a homesick freshman instead of the reigning NBA defensive player of the year. He looked lost, on the court and off. He called pals back in Detroit all the time and sulked. His stat lines from Chicago's first dozen games _ 9.2 rebounds, 5.5 points and 1.5 blocks per game _ suggested Wallace might be phoning those in, too.

We don't have to imagine how that went over with Skiles, whose old-school playing pedigree traces back through the NBA and Michigan State, all the way back to his days as an Indiana prep sharpshooting legend. And he is no less old-school as a coach. Asked three years ago what a promising youngster named Eddy Curry could do to improve his rebounding, Skiles didn't hesitate.

``Jump,'' he replied.

Only Wallace knows why he decided to test those credentials last Saturday night in New York, at the tail end of a five-game losing streak, no less. Maybe it was the 0-for-Philly in the previous night's game, or because Skiles cut off his playing time at 19 minutes. By that point, Wallace and the coach had reportedly tangled over practice and music, so maybe it was something else.

Either way, Wallace started the Knicks game by defying team rules and donned a red headband. As far as Skiles was concerned, he might as well have been waving a cape. Once he saw it, the coach yanked Wallace from the game, then did it again when his centre put the headband back on to start the third quarter. As for the two of them butting heads afterward, suffice it to say that few teams hold a 25-minute closed-door meeting following a win.

``Headband-gate'' had two more days to run, and if there was a dumber argument in sports at that moment, it went unnoticed. Near the end of all that wasted time and effort, Skiles thought he detected a silver lining in the parting clouds.

``I don't think it's the worst thing in the world for them to see some confrontation like that,'' he said about his team, ``as long as it gets resolved.''

If Skiles is lucky, he might look back on Tuesday night as the moment the resolution started. More specifically, he might look back at a six-second sequence when Wallace drove to the basket and missed a layup, fought for the rebound, missed another layup, fought for that rebound, then drove underneath the basket and finally put a reverse layup in.

``There are other guys who go out there with energy and really don't do anything. When he has energy,'' Skiles said about Wallace, ``he plays very well.''

That translated into nearly all the Bulls playing well, then pulling away to win handily 102-85 _ a result to which Wallace contributed eight points, 12 rebounds, two blocks and two assists in 38 tough minutes. But you wouldn't have guessed that had you seen Wallace and his coach at a shootaround earlier in the day.

At the practice, Wallace acknowledged he knew he was breaking the rules by wearing the headband, that he had no regrets doing it, and that he'd happily suffer whatever punishment and/or fine the club decides on. And you would have heard Skiles carrying on about how _ in addition to paying hefty salaries _ the team provides chefs to cook the players lunch, flies them everywhere first-class and pays porters to carry their luggage on the road.

``So much is done for the players, we ask for so little back,'' he began, then caught himself.

``I'm not one of those `when-I-played' guys,'' he added. ``I was the beneficiary of all those things.''

And like Skiles, Wallace has always been an team-first guy. But to Skiles' way of looking at things now, the guy that's supposed to be leading his team star is a 32-year-old mercenary who's making roughly $3 million more a season in Chicago than he would have in Detroit. And the last thing the coach wants to discover is that Wallace's best efforts, not to mention his best years, are already behind him.

For one night at least, the Bulls got their money's worth. Winning makes everybody happy _ it always does _ but beating the Knicks isn't why the organization lavished a big contract on Wallace. Skiles is going to demand that same effort every night from here on out, and if there's going to be more head games ahead of the actual ones, Wallace would do himself well to get them out of the way sooner rather than later.