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Top Five Plays from New Assistant Coach Taj Gibson's Chicago Bulls Career
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- Top Five Plays from New Assistant Coach Taj Gibson's Chicago Bulls Career
(IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect)
There are players you remember for the numbers. There are players you remember for the championships. And then there are players you remember because, for a few unforgettable seconds, they made the entire building shake.
Taj Gibson was that guy in Chicago .
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Now, he's coming home.
After 17 NBA seasons, Gibson has retired from playing and is joining Tiago Splitter 's Bulls staff as an assistant coach, bringing his toughness, intelligence and veteran presence back to the organization that drafted him in 2009.
It's a full-circle moment for a player who spent the first eight seasons of his career in Chicago and became synonymous with the hard-nosed identity of those Bulls teams. Gibson was never the guy expected to carry an offense or dominate the headlines every night. He was the guy you wanted fighting for the rebound, rotating into the paint, setting the screen, taking the charge and doing whatever the possession demanded.
But every once in a while, Taj Gibson reminded everybody that he could put on a show, too. The numbers tell part of his story. The highlights tell the rest.
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From playoff posters to thunderous putbacks, Gibson had a knack for turning the kind of dirty work that usually gets overlooked into moments that brought the United Center to its feet.
So, before Taj starts drawing up plays instead of finishing them, let's rewind the tape.
Here are some of the best Taj Gibson plays from his Chicago Bulls career.
5. The John Lucas III Alley-Oop
March 16, 2012: Bulls vs. Trail Blazers
John Lucas III gets the ball moving in transition, and Gibson is doing what Gibson always did: running the floor.
Lucas sees him.
The lob goes up.
Gibson goes up even higher.
The result is a thunderous fast-break alley-oop with Portland 's Nolan Smith unable to stop the finish. that instantly becomes one of those classic Taj Gibson highlights. There isn't much mystery to it. Lucas puts the ball where it needs to be, Gibson explodes toward the rim and the possession ends with the kind of finish that made Bulls fans stand up before the ball even went through the net.
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That's what made Gibson so dangerous as a finisher. He didn't need a play called for him. He didn't need to isolate a defender or create something off the dribble. If there was space to run, he was going to run. If there was a lane to the basket, he was going to attack it.
And if you were late rotating to the rim, well, that was your problem.
The dunk was vintage Taj: athletic, physical and completely unapologetic.
4. The Lakers Game-Winner
January 20, 2014: Bulls vs. Los Angeles Lakers
For all the thunderous dunks and emphatic blocks that defined Taj Gibson's Chicago career, one of his most memorable moments came with almost no time left on the clock.
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The Bulls and Lakers are tied at 100 in overtime, and Chicago has just 0.9 seconds to make something happen. Mike Dunleavy takes the ball out underneath the basket and finds Gibson cutting straight down the middle.
Taj catches it, gathers and muscles his way to the rim.
Layup. Game over.
Chicago wins 102–100.
It wasn't a poster. It wasn't a block. It wasn't one of the spectacular plays that normally defined Gibson's highlight reel. It was simply Taj making a play when Chicago needed one.
That's an important part of his legacy that can get lost among all the highlights. Gibson was never supposed to be the guy taking the biggest shot. His job was to defend, rebound, screen and clean up the mistakes.
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But when the opportunity came, he didn't hesitate.
He cut to the basket. He caught the pass. He finished.
And with less than a second remaining, Taj Gibson had just given the Bulls the win.
That was Taj Gibson in a nutshell: whatever the moment demanded, he was ready to answer.
3. The Mirza Teletović Putback
Christmas Day, 2013: Bulls vs. Brooklyn Nets
This might be the most Taj Gibson play on the entire list.
Chicago is attacking, Jimmy Butler gets a shot toward the basket and the ball comes off the rim. Gibson crashes into the picture, gets his hand on the rebound and, rather than bringing it down, immediately goes back toward the basket.
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Mirza Teletović is underneath, but it doesn't matter.
Gibson grabs the ball with one hand and throws down the putback over him.
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about this play. Gibson didn't overthink it. He didn't try to reset the offense. He saw the ball, attacked it and finished before the defense could react.
Gibson understood that an offensive rebound wasn't simply another statistic. It was an opportunity to impose yourself on the possession.
That mentality helped make him one of the best offensive rebounders in Bulls history, and this Christmas Day dunk was the perfect visual representation of it.
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Gibson finished that game with 20 points and eight rebounds, but the numbers aren't what stuck with people.
They remembered Taj flying through the lane, grabbing the ball with one hand and hammering it home.
2. The Kris Humphries Poster
2013 Eastern Conference First Round: Bulls vs. Brooklyn Nets
If the Christmas Day dunk showed what Gibson could do against a regular-season opponent, the Kris Humphries poster showed what happened when he brought that same mentality into the playoffs.
The 2013 Bulls were one of the toughest teams in the league, and their first-round series against Brooklyn quickly became a physical battle. Every possession felt like a fight, and Gibson was right in the middle of it.
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Then came the dunk.
Gibson attacks the basket, Humphries rotates over and Taj rises into him, finishing with the kind of authority that immediately turns a routine playoff possession into a highlight.
The best part was the context.
This was playoff basketball. There was no room for hesitation, and Gibson wasn't about to give the defense a chance to dictate what happened next.
He went straight at the rim.
The finish became one of the signature dunks of Chicago's 2013 postseason and another reminder that Gibson wasn't simply a player who benefited from playing alongside stars.
He was capable of creating his own moments.
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The Bulls needed toughness during that series, and Gibson provided it in every possible form.
He had only four points in the game, but two of those points came on a dunk that people were still talking about afterward.
Sometimes a box score doesn't tell you what mattered.
That dunk did.
1. The Dwyane Wade Poster
May 15, 2011: Eastern Conference Finals, Game 1, versus the Miami Heat
There was always going to be a No. 1.
The stage could hardly have been bigger.
The 2011 Eastern Conference Finals. The Chicago Bulls against the Miami Heat . Derrick Rose , LeBron James , Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh . A roaring United Center and two teams fighting for the right to represent the East in the NBA Finals.
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And then Taj Gibson delivered one of the defining moments of that entire playoff run.
C.J. Watson pushes the break, leaves the ball for Gibson, and Taj has a runway. Wade turns to recover, but he's already too late. Gibson rises and detonates a two-handed dunk over him.
Then comes the part every Bulls fan remember: The dunk.
Gibson goes up and finishes with both hands, sending the ball through the rim while Wade is caught underneath the play. The United Center erupts.
It wasn't just a spectacular finish. It was the perfect Taj Gibson moment because of what it represented. Chicago was trying to establish itself against a Miami team that had become the center of the basketball universe, and Gibson wasn't intimidated by the names on the other side.
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He saw the rim. He saw an opening. He attacked it.
The Bulls went on to win Game 1 by 21 points, and Gibson's dunk became one of the enduring images of that postseason.
More than a decade later, it's still the first play that comes to mind when you ask Bulls fans to remember Taj Gibson at his absolute best.
Not because it was the most important basket he ever scored, but because it captured everything people loved about him. The toughness. The athleticism. The fearlessness.
The willingness to do the dirty work, and the ability to make the spectacular look like just another part of the job.
More Than Five Highlights
The temptation with a player like Taj Gibson is to reduce his career to the highlights.
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That's understandable. The highlights are fun.
But the reason those highlights meant so much in Chicago was everything Gibson did between them.
He was the rookie who immediately earned Tom Thibodeau's trust. He was the veteran presence on teams that played some of the toughest basketball in the league. He was the big man who routinely threw himself into the middle of the action, whether that meant battling for an offensive rebound or stepping in front of an attacker at the rim.
He became the kind of player coaches loved and teammates trusted. And Chicago noticed.
That's why his return to the Bulls as an assistant coach feels bigger than simply adding another name to a coaching staff. Gibson knows what it means to wear a Bulls uniform. He knows what the expectations feel like in Chicago. He knows what it means to play in front of a United Center crowd, to grind through an 82-game season and to be asked to sacrifice parts of your own game for the sake of the team. Most importantly, he knows the standard.
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The Taj Gibson who once ran the floor for John Lucas III, crashed the glass against Brooklyn and threw down a dunk over Dwyane Wade will now be standing on the other side of the sideline.
He won't be wearing No. 22 anymore. He won't be waiting for the next substitution. He'll have a clipboard in his hands and a new generation of Bulls to teach. And maybe that's the best part of all.
If Gibson can give Chicago's young players even a fraction of the mentality that made him such a beloved Bull: the toughness, the discipline, the physicality and the willingness to do whatever the team needs, then his impact on the franchise won't end with the final dunk of his playing career.
It will continue from the bench. Taj Gibson spent eight seasons showing Chicago how to play hard. Now he gets to teach it.
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And if the next generation of Bulls starts crashing the glass a little harder, protecting the rim a little more aggressively and playing with a little more edge?
Some of that could be attributed to Taj Gibson's coaching.
