Ben Gordon: There When You Needed Him Most
Throughout the off-season, the team at Bulls Confidential is going to reveal our picks for the top 25 best players in Chicago Bulls franchise history. We are measuring overall impact on the organization, community, and how they impacted their team. Follow along on Twitter by searching #BC25.
25. Mickey Johnson
24. Guy Rodgers
23. Orlando Woolridge
22. Charles Oakley
21. Taj Gibson
20. Bob Boozer
19. Elton Brand
18. Ben Gordon
After the initial post-Jordan years proved to be a challenge for the Bulls, a string of successful drafts in the early-to-mid-2000s turned things around. We’ll get to a number of players from that era in this series, but today we talk about Ben Gordon.
Gordon was drafted third overall out of UConn in 2004, joining a team that had won just 23 games the season before. The new season didn’t begin kindly with the team dropping it’s first nine games, one game shy of setting a franchise record for worst start to a season. Game 10 in Utah encapsulated the career Gordon would have as a Bull, as he scored 22 points off the bench, helping the Bulls to a win.
There’s so many moments like that when you look back at Gordon’s five years in Chicago, taking over games on the offensive end quickly, almost out of nowhere, especially in big spots. There’s so many of them to look back on, but it’s hard not to think immediately about his role in the epic 2009 playoff series against the Boston Celtics.
It’s considered to be one of the best series of all-time, a first round match-up that featured seven overtimes in seven games. And it was often Gordon’s firepower that kept the underdog Bulls alive against the defending champions. In such a memorable series my mind always drifts first to Gordon, who dropped 42 points in Game 2 in a back-and-forth duel with a future Hall of Famer in Ray Allen. He also sent Game 4 into a second overtime, leading to my favorite (fictional) NBA commercial of all time.
The Bulls would lose the series, and despite Gordon dropping 33 points in a Game 7 loss that would wind up being his final game in a Bulls uniform. He would sign with the Pistons in the offseason, and never had the same success in Detroit or his later stops in Charlotte or Orlando as he did with Chicago.
In his Bulls career he averaged 18.5 points a game, while shooting 41.5 percent from deep. He also became the only rookie to win the Sixth Man of the Year Award back in the 2004–2005 season. His tenure in Chicago was short, and his lack of success after leaving makes him easy to forget for many NBA fans. But he played a big part in making the Bulls relevant once again, and because of that, he’s among the best players in team history.
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