Shoulder Shelves Noah

Never mind that Joakim Noah has been invisible for the vast majority of the year.  Forget that 4.5 points per game and shooting 40.7 percent from the field would be career lows or 8.8 rebounds per game would be his fewest since his second year in the league.  He's been improving lately and his energy remains important, so losing him for an extended period would be a blow to a Bulls team already struggling to get anything going consistently.  Yet that's exactly what they're facing.

Getting tangled up with Andrea Bargnani in the third quarter of Monday's loss to the Brooklyn Nets resulted in a sprained shoulder for Noah, according to MRI results.  He will miss at least two weeks, during which he will rehab the shoulder.  After that, he will be re-evaluated.  Fred Hoiberg speculated he might need as many as four weeks to recover.

For all the talk we've had about Noah being a shell of his former self, he still shows flashes of that player at times.  It was on display when he made his first start of the year for the resting Pau Gasol in New York last Saturday, dropping a team-high 21 points and grabbing 10 rebounds.  Granted, he was less fatigued than his fellow starters who played almost all 20 minutes of overtime against Detroit the night before, but he still used Madison Square Garden as a platform for how valuable he still is.

Suddenly, one of Hoiberg's options for shaking up the starting lineup at a time the Bulls have dipped to fourth in the Central and seventh in the East is not there.  He probably would have stuck with Taj Gibson, as he's been doing recently, but he needs all hands on deck to try and break this three-game skid.  With a tough back-to-back on the road against Oklahoma City and Dallas approaching, this is a bad time for the Bulls to become shorthanded down low.  Zach Lowe of ESPN wrote there are no defensive energy issues on this team, but based on all the second chances I've seen them surrender lately as well as not cracking down on teams in the clutch, that's a bunch of baloney and that might become even more true these next few weeks.

Even with his overall struggles this year, Noah at least gives them a chance to succeed on defense.  After all, he wasn't the 2014 Defensive Player of the Year for nothing.  But that, along with his energy, are now unavailable, so those will have to come from someone else.

If Jimmy Butler really wants to be the undisputed leader of this organization, maybe that will have to come from him.  Perhaps this serves as a wake-up call for Derrick Rose, as in seeing his longtime teammate go down in a troubling time for the team will light a spark that's been missing from him all year.  Or will Gasol and Gibson have to collectively make up for it?  If it comes down to that, the Bulls might be in worse shape than we thought.

Alas, the games must go on and the Bulls will continue to play them.  Whether they play well in them is the burning question.  My 27th birthday likely will have come and gone by the time Noah returns and who knows where the Bulls will be by then in such a tight conference?  They'll likely be ready for these upcoming quality opponents as they usually are, but how can they do that without their main oil?