The Chicago Bulls' front line was supposed to be a source of strength this season, but it has never looked weaker than it does right now.
As a result, the Bulls are all knotted up with the Cleveland Cavaliers, looking shaky ahead of a pivotal Game 5 in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
Staying alive against a Cavs team missing its own frontcourt key, Kevin Love, will demand resourcefulness and faith in the members of the once-vaunted front line who haven't done much to justify it lately.
Oh, and it'll probably also require covering for Pau Gasol, whose sore hamstring kept him out of Game 4 and will likely sideline him in Game 5, per ESPN's Nick Friedell. That won't be easy, as Derrick Rose explained to Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times: "When you miss a player like Pau, it's devastating."
Where should the Bulls look for clues on how to proceed? How about the biggest data set available: the two-man unit numbers from the regular season, per NBA.com.
The information here is noisy. For example, add Jimmy Butler to the Nikola Mirotic-Joakim Noah tandem, and the three-man unit's net rating leaps to plus-20.1 points per 100 possessions.
The larger problem is that no specific pairing jumps out as an obvious fix. Other than telling us Noah and Taj Gibson simply shouldn't see the court together, all we learn from the regular season is that most of the Bulls' 4-5 combinations were pretty good.
Of course, focusing on regular-season information ignores the fact that this entire group is in a different physical state than it was for most of the year.
Gasol is listed as day-to-day. His absence allowed Noah to be a bigger part of the offense in Game 4, but the results were at best mixed. Noah finished with eight points and 15 rebounds but made just four of 12 shots from the field.
Noah, for his part, has looked unsteady for most of the regular season and playoffs. So much so lately that B/R's Ethan Skolnick suggested after Game 2 that Chicago might need to diminish his role:
Simply, if Noah doesn't show something soon, Thibodeau needs to reduce his minutes and try someone else, maybe the more offensively able Mirotic, who finished second in Rookie of the Year voting but has been granted only nine minutes in the first two games.
That sounds crazy to say considering all Noah has meant in recent years to the franchise, to the city, to the coach trying to keep everyone together. But Noah is regularly the fifth-best Bull on the court.
Gibson left Game 4 with a knee injury, and Nikola Mirotic has seen his spot in the rotation shrink substantially during the postseason. He finally logged some fourth-quarter minutes in Game 4, but that period featured a Bulls offense that scored just 16 points and let the Cavaliers steal the game.
Hardly an endorsement for Mirotic there.
Viewed in contrast with the expectations that attached to this front line earlier in the year, this laundry list of issues is relatively shocking.
The Bulls have to get past that "how did we get here?" feeling, though, and move on to the task of making the most of what they've got.
That effort will be constrained by what the opposition does. Specifically, Cleveland's use of a Tristan Thompson-Timofey Mozgov combo means Mirotic is a risky play because of the rebounding advantage the Cavs' bigs would possess.
Conversely, going bigger when the Cavaliers downsize could result in plodding transition defense. That's a problem against a team with LeBron James barreling up and down the floor.
Matchups, as ever, will dictate much of what the Bulls do with their bigs.
There are some tenets to cling to, though.
The first: Gibson and Noah cannot share the floor. We saw their ugly net rating from the regular season above, and they've been even worse in this series, posting a minus-11.8 in 46 minutes.
Maybe that means we won't see plays that combine Noah's wild inaccuracy and Gibson's bounce like this one, but sacrifices have to be made.
Gasol and Noah are the Bulls' best option, according to the numbers. Together, they've amassed a net rating of plus-20.9 points per 100 possessions in 43 minutes against Cleveland. If Gasol can't go in Game 5 or the rest of the series, it may be time to try a Mirotic-Gibson pairing.
That duo has performed extremely well in a small 17-minute sample so far in this series. Size and rebounding would be a problem, but perhaps Chicago is willing to risk that for more spacing and speed.
There's no perfect option available, but that's where the Bulls are now with their suddenly vulnerable collection of frontcourt players. They'll have to make concessions somewhere, whether on the boards or on defense. They'll have to hide some flaws.
And more than anything else, they'll have to hope the guard play they've been getting from Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler carries them.
That's the bright side in all of this.
Rose, once a perpetual question mark, is now part of the steadiest section of the roster. If the purportedly rock-solid front line forms up in time, these Bulls just might get something special accomplished.
All stats courtesy of NBA.com unless otherwise indicated.