The playtime of the Chicago Bulls players also reveals the reason for their decline in performance—Yao Ming averaged 34 minutes in March's 16 games, but only 27 minutes in April's 9 games. Hinrich and Luol Deng's minutes were also reduced by 3-4 minutes.
Obviously, they didn't want fifth place, giving the Hawks team a chance to catch up.
Zhang Yang was puzzled by this; if they didn't want fifth place, then why did they fight so hard in March? Anyway, the seventh and eighth spots have at most a fifty percent win rate, so there's no way they can surpass them.
In his 15th NBA year, Hill used his rich playing and watching experience to analyze for Zhang Yang: "They don't want sixth place, certainly because they don't want to meet us early in the playoffs. They fought so hard in March possibly to test their abilities and show their strength to increase deterrence in the playoffs.
