Column: Short-handed Bulls were most heartwarming tale of NBA postseason, but it's over.

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  Chicago Bulls bench watch during the second half of Game 4 of an NBA basketball playoffs Eastern Conference semifinal against the Miami Heat on Monday, May 13, 2013, in Chicago. The Heat won 88-65. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)The Associated Press

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  Miami Heat small forward LeBron James (6) reacts during the second half of Game 4 of an NBA basketball playoffs Eastern Conference semifinal against the Chicago Bulls on Monday, May 13, 2013, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)The Associated Press

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  Chicago Bulls forward Carlos Boozer talks to an official during the second half of Game 4 of an NBA basketball playoffs Eastern Conference semifinal against the Miami Heat on Monday, May 13, 2013, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)The Associated Press

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CHICAGO –  The little engine that could finally threw a gear.

The Chicago Bulls might have been the most heartwarming tale going this postseason, but it's over. Unlike the bedtime story, fumes and spare parts get you only so far in the NBA. It was always a matter of when — not if — they'd fall apart.

Go back and take a look at what happened in the third quarter of their Eastern Conference semifinal Monday night against the Miami Heat, or better yet, don't. It was about as ugly as you'd imagine. The Bulls scored exactly nine points in the period, an all-time franchise low.

At various times in the final quarter, Chicago had Nazr Mohammed, Daequan Cook, Malcolm Thomas, Marquis Teague and 35-year-old Rip Hamilton on the floor. What's scary isn't that some NBA fans had no idea that any or all of that group was in the league; rather, it's that many of those same fans wouldn't recognize the guys they were supposed to be spelling.

The Bulls wound up shooting 26 percent and totaled just 65 points by the end of Game 4, another team record for futility. Yet they probably had no business getting that many, let alone this far in the playoffs.

"We're kind of putting screws and bandages everywhere," said forward Taj Gibson, another backup pressed into regular service. "It's frustrating. Every night and every day.

"It's rough. It's really rough," he added a moment later. "I wish I could explain how I'm feeling right now. How everybody in this locker room is feeling now."

Actually, there's no need for a lengthy explanation when a glance will do. Gibson had icepacks covering both knees as he talked. Across the room, Joakim Noah had his right foot (plantar fasciitis) submerged in a bucket of ice. Next to him, Nate Robinson had an icepack covering his left shoulder. The players who hadn't left in a hurry to lick their wounds at home were still lined up in the trainer's room, awaiting their turns.

Every team has to cope with injuries, but what happened to the Bulls and coach Tom Thibodeau this season gives the phrase new meaning. His best player, Derrick Rose, the league's MVP in 2011, was a scratch at the start because of knee surgery, and despite a doctor's note clearing him to return in March, he never did. Somehow, the Bulls won 45 regular-season games, then even more surprising, beat back Brooklyn in the first round.

Naturally, things only got worse. Chicago's second-best offensive player, Luol Deng, who played all season with a variety of hurts, has missed the last six playoff games; the Bulls' best perimeter defender, Kirk Heinrich, similarly battling injuries for months, has been out for the last seven.

Now the Bulls head to Miami down 3-1, where this series will end — officially, but mercifully, too.

"They're in a tough situation," LeBron James said — not that it stopped him from dropping 27 points on Chicago's wearied defenders. "They've had some injuries and illnesses and whatever's going on. They don't have their full roster, but that's not for us to worry about."

That was Thibodeau's worry all season, and the jury could be out for a while deciding whether he treated the players available at any given moment like a chess master or a meat grinder. The team's unofficial motto became "Next Man Up!" — the Bulls left a placard with the slogan on every seat in the arena Monday night — but "Next Man Down!' might turn out to be more accurate in the long run.

Thibodeau possesses one of the league's best defensive minds, and the effort he coaxed, mostly from a bench long on second-stringers, was something to behold. In what might have been his final motivational ploy for this season, Thibodeau put out a revised lineup just moments before Game 4 with Deng listed as "active," even though he wasn't long out of a hospital bed. The coach also reached deep into his doghouse and finally tossed a few minutes to Hamilton, who like Robinson, shoots the ball without conscience and is a defensive liability.

Neither is Thibodeau's kind of player. Whether the pair returns remains to be seen, though you could say the same about a few more of the youngsters and castoffs the coach used to great effect. The more important question is whether the front-liners — Rose, Deng, Heinrich and Noah, who's played relentlessly despite the foot injury — will continue to entrust their careers to a coach who won't, or can't, ever take his foot off the throttle.

Afterward, Thibodeau was asked whether the Bulls' performance was proof they'd simply "run out of steam."

"No," he replied. "I think the thing is they're (Heat) a great team. We have to come out with great intensity — but we also have to make shots."

The Bulls never really had enough guys who could do that — shoot — to seriously contend. They came back down 3-1 against the Nets and stole the first game of this series with toughness and intensity, but they're short on those qualities now, and exhausted to boot.

"There's a lot left in the tank," Robinson said bravely. "Down 3-1, you never know. Take it to Game 7 and we end up winning, it's going to be a beautiful story to tell my kids one day."

Or not.

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org

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Column: Tiger Woods is confident, but is he Tiger of old going into Masters?

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  Tiger Woods yells out to his caddie on the driving range during a practice round for the Masters golf tournament Tuesday, April 9, 2013, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)The Associated Press

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  Tiger Woods chips to a putting green on the driving range during a practice round for the Masters golf tournament Tuesday, April 9, 2013, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)The Associated Press

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  In a photo taken with a fisheye lens, Tiger Woods tees off on the third hole during a practice round for the Masters golf tournament Tuesday, April 9, 2013, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)The Associated Press

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  Tiger Woods watches his shot out of a bunker on the second hole during a practice round for the Masters golf tournament Tuesday, April 9, 2013, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)The Associated Press

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  Tiger Woods walks down the second fairway during a practice round for the Masters golf tournament Tuesday, April 9, 2013, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)The Associated Press

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AUGUSTA, Ga. –  He's got a swing he can finally trust, a putter that shows flashes of the old magic, and a string of wins to prove that it's all finally coming together.

The superstar girlfriend is an added bonus, though by now so much time has passed that the debate about Tiger Woods revolves around the state of his game, not his personal life.

Winning may not take care of everything, as his latest Nike ad claims. But six wins in his comeback are a confidence-inducing tonic for Woods, and the commercial is certainly more upbeat than the one Nike ran two years ago with his late father ominously asking him what he could have been thinking.

Woods is more upbeat, too, and with good reason. When last seen here a year ago he was kicking clubs, missing putts and muttering to himself about chances gone awry. He didn't break par in four rounds, and left with barely enough prize money to fuel up his private jet.

Now he's a heavy favorite to win his fifth Masters and kick start his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus in the majors. The swagger that has always suited him so well seems to be back, and the way he was talking Tuesday this might not be a good year to bet against him.

"I feel comfortable with every aspect of my game," Woods said.

Woods could have been talking about his life, too. More than once during his pre-Masters news conference he did, especially when speaking of the joys of fatherhood and how he can teach his children the basics of golf in the backyard short game complex at his South Florida mansion.

Lindsey Vonn wasn't mentioned at all, but she has to figure in all this newfound bliss, too. Just a few weeks ago, Woods and the Olympic skiing champion announced they were in a relationship in a series of photos both posted on social media sites.

And while Woods is normally taciturn to a fault in interviews, he laughed, had a few funny lines, and was more introspective than usual in the press center on Tuesday.

"I think it's just a balance, a balance in life," Woods said. "I think that's what you're seeing."

Whether it all translates into another green jacket is anyone's guess. Golf is a funny game even for Tiger Woods, and the tricky greens of Augusta National have derailed his high hopes before.

He won four Masters in a nine-year stretch after breaking through with his historic win in 1997, but he hasn't celebrated here since 2005.

This is a Masters he badly — almost desperately — needs, and not just to completely validate his comeback from injuries and marriage scandal.

The clock is ticking on his chase of the Nicklaus record of 18 major championships — Woods has 14 — and the player who once held all four major titles at once has now gone almost five years without winning even one.

He's 37 now, not an advanced age by any stretch for a golfer. But Woods has been playing the Masters for half his life — this will be his 19th time competing — and as each year goes by another opportunity slips away.

There's a 14-year-old from China who wasn't even born when Woods won in 1997 in the field this week and if Woods had to be reminded about time passing by, he was by a question about what age he would entertain becoming a ceremonial starter in the Masters like Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.

"Let me just try to get to 40 first," he said.

Woods is still the No. 1 player in the world — taking over from Rory McIlroy after winning at Bay Hill earlier this year — but his drought at the majors is more often the subject of conversation than the fact he has rebuilt his game and is winning again.

That's partly his own fault, since he has focused almost singularly on them ever since he was growing up in Southern California with a chart of Nicklaus major championship wins on his wall.

"It took Jack a while to get to 18, all the way until he was 46 years old," Woods said. "So there's plenty of opportunities for me."

The first of those opportunities begins Thursday morning on a course he both knows and loves. Woods is a player who tends to win in bunches on certain courses and, aside from last year's lackluster performance, Augusta National usually brings out the best in him.

His winning drought in majors has been long, but not terribly surprising considering he had to rebuild a knee, a swing and a personal life after winning the U.S. Open on one leg at Torrey Pines.

Woods cautioned repeatedly that at least the knee and swing were a work in progress, but golf at this level also requires a clear head and the kind of focus that made Woods so fearsome in his younger days.

The Masters is always huge because of what it represents and because it is the first major of the year. For Woods, though, the stakes are even higher this year, if only because he needs to demonstrate to himself that he can still win at the highest level.

The man he's chasing understands that better than anyone.

"It's been a while," Nicklaus said. "He's going to have to figure it out. But I think if he figures it out here, it will be a great boost for him. If he doesn't figure it out here, after the spring he's had, I think it will be a lot tougher for him."

For now, Nicklaus is the greatest golfer ever, and until Woods catches him the title is still his.

This week could say a lot about how long or fruitful that chase will be.

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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org or http://twitter.com/timdahlberg

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Column: Everybody else cares about the World Baseball Classic. Can Americans be far behind?

Bringing the world closer together through baseball sure sounded like a good idea.

Of course, that was before most Americans found out how much other countries actually cared about beating them at their national pastime. First, Taiwan got caught trying to smuggle a few scouts disguised as umpires into a game to spy on South Korea before the start of the World Baseball Classic, nearly touching off an international incident. Then Canada and Mexico staged a full-scale brawl in the ninth-inning of their WBC encounter Saturday in Phoenix.

While the Taiwanese-South Korea tiff melted away following a diplomatic apology, not so the rumble between the neighbors on either side of the U.S. border. Video of the brawl went viral almost immediately, and while it may not have been the kind of publicity Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig had in mind when he started the WBC in 2006, it's created more attention on these shores for this year's event than the two previous tournaments combined. Suddenly, it's game on.

"Amazing, wasn't it, the way that woke everybody up around here?" said Bobby Valentine, who's managed three MLB clubs — Rangers, Mets and Red Sox — as well as Japan's Chiba Lotte Marines on two different occasions.

Valentine happened to be in Japan during the weekend, where interest in the two-time defending champions — Japan beat Cuba in the inaugural WBC and South Korea in 2009 — is already off the charts. More than a third of the nation tuned in to watch the host's opening-round win over China. And many of those same fans were still trying to decipher the underpinnings of the Canada-Mexico brawl three days earlier.

"It's the same game everywhere, but a different experience watching over there," Valentine added. "Baseball has so many unwritten rules that we — meaning Americans — just take nuances like hitting a batter for granted. But once you see it played elsewhere, and see it played with the same kind of passion but a different perspective on some things, you start to wonder, 'Who writes those so-called unwritten rules? And who bothers to read them?'"

Certainly not the Mexican team.

Canada led off the ninth ahead 9-3, but because the WBC employs run-differential as a tiebreaker, the Northerners were still looking to pad their margin. Catcher Chris Robinson, who had already been bounced around in a collision at home plate, led off by bunting down the third-base line. The tactic so infuriated Mexico third baseman Luis Cruz, who thought the Canadians were trying to show his team up, that he locked eyes with his pitcher, Arnold Leon, then pointed to his side and basically instructed his pitcher to plunk the next batter.

Leon complied, though he needed three pitches to finally hit Canada's Rene Tosoni. That cleared both benches. At one point, as punches and throwdowns continued on either side of him, former major league player and current Canadian first-base coach Larry Walker found himself trying to restrain Alfredo Aceves, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who was moonlighting as a member of the Mexican staff.

"I had a hold of him, and I think I saw Satan in his eyes," Walker said afterward. "It was scary. I was just hoping he wasn't going to throw punches at me, because that would've been trouble."

Unnecessary trouble at that.

Mexico manager Rick Renteria conceded afterward his players probably had no idea that the run-differential rule was in place, and if WBC officials are smart, they'll replace it with a less-combustible tiebreaker as soon as it's practical. At least those same officials didn't exacerbate the bad feelings by handing out suspensions, which would have proved meaningless. Mexico was eliminated in that loss and the Canadians got bumped in their next game by the United States.

Yet while fans over here were suddenly scouring the TV listings to figure out when the U.S. team plays next — Tuesday, against Puerto Rico in Miami — those in Japan were still fixated on the brawl. Over there, fights at baseball games are exceedingly rare, while bunting for a hit and stealing a base are part of every game, no matter the score.

Japan head coach Masataka Nashida said if a brawl broke out in one of his team's games, his "players will say, 'Run!'"

"We just have to look at the size of those guys, and we'll stop in our tracks for fear," he said.

What Nashida isn't worried about, though, is what takes place between the white lines. His squad has already booked a place in the WBC championship round, March 17-19 in San Francisco, and with traditional power Cuba already eliminated — by the Netherlands, no less — Japan's path to a third straight WBC title game looks clearer.

"You can't imagine how big the game is there," Valentine said. "When I was managing in 2006, we lost something like nine players to the national team, then had to wait an extra week or two before they came back for games because they had to be congratulated by the prime minister. Imagine letting guys go for that long over here. MLB would be apoplectic."

It won't happen anytime soon. That's part of the reason the U.S. team had little success in the first two installments of the WBC and why American fans have been lukewarm about the tournament since.

"People here just figured we were going to be like the Dream Team at the Olympics, like we should win every game by the mercy rule. And when that didn't happen, we came up with excuses like, 'We didn't really try' or whatever," Valentine said. "So the reaction this time will be interesting because there's no longer any question about how much everybody else in the world is trying."

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.

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