Coming home following TKO

CHICAGO. — You have to accept that bad things happen in the playoffs.

You have to know that teams are going to make runs on you and referees are going to miss calls, and there are going to be moments when you have to learn to absorb it all.

The Wizards have shown no capacity to be resilient in the playoffs. They have shown no ability to roll with a punch. The bad stuff hits, and the Wizards let the bad get worse.

The Wizards start to teeter, and their knees start to buckle, and they start to look like a punch-drunk fighter in dire need of a standing-eight count.

At least this is how it has been in the first two games of the playoffs in United Center. This is how it was in the Bulls’ 113-103 victory in Game2 last night.

The Wizards had it going their way in the early going against the Bulls. They bolted to a 13-point lead and appeared to be in the mood to play pressure defense. They flustered the Bulls. They induced turnovers from the Bulls. They made the Bulls exhaust the 24-second shot clock on a couple of occasions.

And then, in minutes, it all started to come apart. Gilbert Arenas and Larry Hughes started looking for calls that never were going to come their way. Hughes started to think he had to impose his will on the proceedings.

It was not to be. The Wizards can look so smooth in stretches. Then they can look so out of it in other stretches.

The Bulls, at least at home, already seem to have an intuitive feel for the playoffs. They turn up their defense as the game goes along. The Wizards are almost the opposite. They played some of their best defense of the season in the first quarter before defense almost seemed to become an afterthought.

Part of it stemmed from the substitution patterns of the coaches and the matchups. The eyes of Bulls coach Scott Skiles lit up as soon as Juan Dixon entered the game. Wherever Dixon went on defense — often on Kirk Hinrich — rest assured that he was going to get a toasting.

The Wizards lacked either the moxie or discipline to exploit similar advantages. Arenas should have planted Jannero Pargo in the post and worked him over. Pargo weighs about 90 pounds and came into the game to launch long jumpers.

But Skiles was permitted the luxury of Pargo the shooter without paying the price for Pargo the 90-pound defender.

It turned ugly in the end. Hinrich could not be denied on offense, while the maneuverings of Etan Thomas, Kwame Brown and Dixon were sometimes painful to watch. A warning should have been posted to children watching the telecast of the game back in Washington.

Children, you do not shuffle both feet — the walk was not called — and hoist an air ball from 15 feet. That was one of Brown’s gems in the second quarter.

The Bulls are a scrappy bunch, and they rarely looked to the referees in the two games here.

Now maybe all that will change in Tony Cheng’s neighborhood. Maybe it will be the Bulls in need of smelling salts and a trainer to ask, “How many fingers?”

The Bulls are as new to the postseason as the Wizards. On their last visit to the District earlier this month, the Bulls fell behind by a bunch early and never really put their fingerprints on the proceedings.

Late in last night’s game, with the Wizards still within striking distance, the Wizards ran two defenders at Antonio Davis and left open Hinrich.

You know what happened next. Davis delivered the ball to the hot hand, and Hinrich hit the 3-pointer.

The game can be fairly simple if you choose to let it be simple.

If you want to dribble a hole in the floor to China — as Dixon often does — then the game becomes incredibly difficult.

The Wizards can only hope the shift home eases their difficulties.