The ridiculous plays that made Mavericks-Bulls the game of the year

The NBA regular season is too long. There are too many back-to-backs, too many injuries and too many meaningless games in a league where every division winner is typically decided before New Year’s Eve.

There shouldn’t have been anything particularly remarkable about this game. The Bulls were playing their first home game after two weeks on the road and had a back-to-back across the country in Charlotte the next night. The Mavericks were in the middle of a four-game road trip of their own, capped by a Wednesday night game in Milwaukee. There are tons of boring Tuesday night regular season games across the league every year.

But once in a while everything goes bonkers. Once in a while, you get a game like the one the Bulls and Mavericks just played.

I was in the arena on Tuesday for my first Bulls game of the season. Here’s what we’ll remember from the Mavericks’ 132-129 double-overtime victory.

Under these circumstances, the team leading is going to win the game 99 percent of the time. Kirk Hinrich is the 1 percent.

About 20 minutes before this play happened, I told my friend I was going to stop being so mean to Hinrich in 2015. That New Year’s resolution lasted negative-30 days.

Dirk knows. Speaking of Dirk ...

It didn’t seem like Dirk played his best game on Tuesday, but he still finished with 22 points, 10 assists and seven rebounds on 22 shots. Pretty good for a not the best game kind of night for the 36-year-old.

Dirk was clearly hobbled against the Bulls, but it didn’t really stop him. He was grabbing his back every time down the court and spent timeouts lying on the floor to try to stretch it out. On the next possession, he’d plant his feet in the mid-post, get a smaller player on his back and hit a turnaround jump shot. There was nothing the Bulls could do about it, because there’s nothing anyone can do it about it.

Will there even be players like Monta Ellis 10 years from now? The undersized shooting guard who doesn’t defend or score efficiently might not have a place in this league for long the way things are going. That shouldn’t really take anything away from Ellis, though. He’s an incredible talent and a blast to watch, and on Tuesday he was squarely in his element.

Monta straight up scorched the Bulls. He scored with 38 points ... but needed 35 shots to do it. He also had only one assist. That’s the type of performance that will get dissected and shamed on the Internet all week, but I’m sure Ellis doesn’t care. He hit huge shots and his team won. The man has TWTW.

Is Pau still alive right now? Someone check on him. If he gives a thumbs up, he’s probably all good.

Gasol has looked like a great free agent signing for the Bulls so far, but there are some nights when you can’t help but think Thibodeau is trying to kneecap him. Tuesday was one of those nights. There really aren’t any circumstances where Gasol should be playing 50 minutes in December, but that’s exactly what happened against the Mavericks. It’s the most Pau has played in a game since 2009. He was 29 then. Now he’s 34.

Fortunately, Pau probably won’t care too much. The man has much more important things on his mind:

Best damn tweeter alive.

I would love to tell you what the United Center was like when Derrick Rose swished this running floater from the three-point line to send the game into double OT, but I really don’t remember. It was loud, probably? People were really happy?

I think I blacked out for a second there. Derrick might have, too:

The ongoing war on Derrick Rose doesn’t seem like it’s going to end anytime soon. As the resident D. Rose defender, I can tell you I was attacked by about 11 different family members on Thanksgiving who all think Rose is a wimp. Way too many people in Chicago believe that. Unfortunately, it’s not going to change until Rose stays healthy for multiple months in a row. Even then, he’ll have to stay healthy (and be productive) in the playoffs.

It’s a no-win situation, but it’s still so much better than the situation the Bulls were in the last two seasons. You know, the one where Derrick Rose didn’t play at all. It’s easy to wish that people could talk about Rose with even a hint of empathy, but he makes way too much money for that. This is when I typically point out how the Bulls have made more money than any NBA team over the last two decades, how they’ve paid the luxury tax only once, how Rose is actually underpaid because the NBA is the only sports league in the world with the audacity to have a max contract ...

Ah, who cares. If only for a moment, Derrick Rose was a sports hero again, and that’s all that matters.

Crazy game. If these two teams come out flat in Charlotte and Milwaukee, respectively, Wednesday night, I don’t think anyone can blame them.

★★★