In baseball, a team will hire a new GM and he typically comes in with a 5 year plan to turn around the team. Well, folks, it's been 5 years and the Bulls are on pace to finish with about the same 30 win record that Pax inherited when he first came in, and look like a bunch of quitters. Reinsdorf is a baseball man, keep that in mind. Pax came in talking about the team playing the right way, whatever that is. He traded away the best players for crap, and signed NBDL guys to fill out the roster. He wanted to give us a roster of guys who were hungry and maleable, guys who'd play all out at both ends until they needed a breather and the guys who came in as subs would do likewise. He struck gold in the draft with Deng, Gordon, and Duhon, then signed Nocioni. For 3 years, they bought into playing the right way (for lack of a better way to say it). The team won 40+ games. On the court, the players were willing to play their hearts out, until now. Bulls Basketball isn't just played on the court, it's played on Pax's spreadsheet and financial forecasts. It isn't obvious to a 19 year old kid or even a 22 year old kid that the quality of their play won't translate into fair market value, and Paxson has towed the line on fiscal matters. If you're a Paxson as GM fan, you don't mind it that big bucks have been paid to Antonio Davis and PJ Brown and Tim Thomas, because it makes the spreadsheet look nice. If you're a young basketball player, looking at those big salaries and realizing you're worth more, you're in for a rude surprise. Well, the shit has officially hit the fan. Over the past few seasons, the players not only saw the big bucks go to over-the-hill players, but they've seen fellow young budding stars moved in trades to other teams willing to pay them fair wages. This past offseason, both Deng and Gordon could have been extended, which they would have seen as just compensation for their hard work and performance to date. Instead, they are looking like they're going to get the Crawford treatment - you're RFA, go get your best deal and we'll match it. RFA hasn't worked to date very well for the players. They're under pressure to sign a lesser deal or risk a career ending injury while playing out their Qualifying Offer year. Other teams have to have the cap space to make a fair offer, as well, and few teams have that cap space each offseason. So what are the players to do? I relate it to the blue flu. They go on strike this season. It's not their true contract year when they're auditioning for other teams. They're seriously underpaid. Why not play to the level of compensation, and play hard next season while playing out the QO? This is the players' only recourse, given the way the CBA is and works. Management, and particularly Paxson, has stuck their thumb in the eyes of the players all along. The players finally got together and figured out that to stick it to the man, they need to leave as UFA, forget the S&T scenarios. What I see on the court is consistent with what I'm saying. It doesn't help that Boylan was hired only as interim head coach. It's like having a substitute teacher in school who doesn't know the ropes or the students - the students will take advantage of it My sense is that Paxson is going to finish out the season and then be replaced. His 5-year plan hasn't been a great success, and a new face and a new plan may be the only hope of keeping the UFA train from leaving the station. It fits with Boylan getting an interim deal - the next GM would want to pick his own coach; if Pax were staying (or his position secure), he'd want his newly hired coach to have the rest of the season to work with and evaluate the players with a forward looking plan in mind.
Well, I didn't go through the litany of mistakes Pax has made all along, or it'd have turned into an anti-Pax rant. At this point, I don't see it that Reinsdorf has given him the indication his job is fully secure beyond this season. It will be interesting to see what happens when the season ends. The Bulls were in pretty sad shape two seasons ago and somehow made a late push and made the playoffs. I think that's the hope at this point. If not, Reinsdorf really has to look at the situation and will see players who've quit, and it's not the coach that can be blamed anymore.
This team reminds of the 02-03 Bulls that won 30 games. I know the 03-04 team was worse, but 02-03 team had talent and was bad. Here's the similarities. --Cancer team leader with quickly declining skills: Jalen Rose/Eddie Robinson, Ben Wallace --Veteran leadership that didn't play: Adrian Griffin, Corie Blount --Bad play from the point guard: Rose/Crawford/Williams, Gordon/Hinrich/Duhon (who is the best of any on the list) --Too much young talent who will never become contributors in the league: Fizer, Crawford, Bagaric, Baxter -- Sefolosha?, Noah?, Thomas?. --Lack of uber-star --Reliance on young players for roles they were not ready to play There you have it. Jalen Rose 82 82 40.9 .406 .370 .854 .80 3.50 4.30 4.8 .88 .28 3.48 3.30 22.1 Donyell Marshall 78 53 30.5 .459 .379 .756 3.00 6.00 9.00 1.8 1.22 1.09 1.73 3.00 13.4 Marcus Fizer 38 0 21.3 .465 .167 .657 2.10 3.60 5.70 1.3 .37 .45 1.50 2.30 11.7 Jamal Crawford 80 31 24.9 .413 .355 .806 .30 2.10 2.30 4.2 .96 .31 1.68 1.60 10.7 Eddy Curry 81 48 19.4 .585 .000 .624 1.40 2.90 4.40 .5 .22 .77 1.69 2.80 10.5 Jay Williams 75 54 26.1 .399 .322 .640 .40 2.20 2.60 4.7 1.15 .23 2.28 2.40 9.5 Tyson Chandler 75 68 24.4 .531 .000 .608 2.30 4.60 6.90 1.0 .49 1.41 1.80 2.90 9.2 Eddie Robinson 64 18 21.2 .492 .214 .810 1.20 1.90 3.10 1.0 .97 .20 .81 1.90 5.7 Lonny Baxter 55 0 12.4 .466 .000 .680 1.20 1.80 3.00 .3 .16 .40 .84 2.50 4.8 Trenton Hassell 82 53 24.4 .367 .325 .745 .50 2.70 3.10 1.8 .55 .74 1.01 2.40 4.2 Rick Brunson 17 0 11.5 .460 .667 .833 .20 .90 1.10 2.1 .59 .18 1.00 1.20 3.5 Corie Blount 50 3 16.7 .485 .000 .571 1.40 2.70 4.10 1.0 .66 .38 .86 2.40 3.0 Fred Hoiberg 63 0 12.4 .389 .238 .820 .20 2.00 2.20 1.1 .63 .08 .40 .90 2.3 Dalibor Bagaric 10 0 7.6 .308 .000 .750 .70 1.30 2.00 .4 .30 .30 .50 1.10 1.9 Roger Mason 17 0 6.6 .355 .333 1.000 .10 .60 .70 .7 .24 .00 .29 1.20 1.
I don't want to fire Paxson yet. He's a decent talent evaluator. More importantly, I'd like to think that he's learning from his mistakes and won't repeat them in the future. If you accept that idea, then it's very likely he would be better than anyone else Jerry Reinsdorf could find. Also, a new GM would likely start a 7 year rebuilding plan. I'm not sure I could stomach that. The quickest way to compete for a championship is to keep as many quality players as possible while clearing cap space for 2010, when Lebron and Wade are FA. If that plan fails, then it's time to rebuild.
Last time we cleared cap space to sign a FA, it turned out to be Wallace. I wouldn't bank on LBJ and Wade being available on the market in 2010. If Reinsdorf wants to keep Paxson on as a draft evaluator, so be it, but I doubt it I don't see that choosing Thomas over Aldridge and/or Roy shows a good eye for talent. Or signing Wallace... Or keeping Deng over Kobe or Gasol. Or pinning the entire hopes of the team's success on Hinrich. Ad infinitum.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Denny Crane @ Jan 16 2008, 03:41 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Last time we cleared cap space to sign a FA, it turned out to be Wallace. I wouldn't bank on LBJ and Wade being available on the market in 2010.</div> The idea is to get an elite player. Tanking doesn't guarantee that you will get one in the draft. Clearing cap space doesn't guarantee that you will get one in FA. I do think the probability of LBJ or Wade being available in FA is very slim. But usually that probability is zero. I wouldn't bet on Dwight Howard or Carmelo or Amare ever reaching FA. But given the state of the Heat and the Cavs, it does seem somewhat likely that one of Lebron or Wade may opt out. And adding one of them to whatever players we are able to keep would instantly make the Bulls a championship-contending team, I think. <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>If Reinsdorf wants to keep Paxson on as a draft evaluator, so be it, but I doubt it I don't see that choosing Thomas over Aldridge and/or Roy shows a good eye for talent. Or signing Wallace... Or keeping Deng over Kobe or Gasol. Or pinning the entire hopes of the team's success on Hinrich. Ad infinitum.</div> None of those moves/non-moves, except for signing Ben Wallace, seem especially bad to me given the circumstances at the time. Hell, at this point you could probably argue that not trading Deng for Kobe or Gasol was a great move - those teams were never going to compete.
rwj The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding isn't very good. You can lose with this cast of characters, or at least try to roll the dice on some different combination of players and hope to be better. At the very least, you hope you can incrementally trade up each of your players for a slightly better one over time. And yeah, the Thomas pick was horrible and people mentioned it at the time. Getting Viktor back in the deal with Thomas didn't really sweeten it much. On paper, LeBron has a good enough supporting cast. So he got dumped in the finals last year at the age of 21 - he'll learn to handle it better. This season isn't over yet, either. There's obviously certain GMs and coaches who can take a bad situation and turn it around in a hurry, and for the long haul. Colangelo is one, and both Skiles and Doug Collins and Don Nelson were the kinds of coaches will overachieve no matter the talent on the team, but who can't get you a championship no matter how great the talent on the team.
Yes, blow it up. I look at the team and I think they're not a great fit for each other, not motivated, and occasionally way overpaid. We can talk about it however we want, but it comes down to a very simple proposition that's very hard to execute. 1. Good players 2. Who's talents and age fit each other 3. Not overpaid, so you can get enough of them together We've got: * Hinrich, who I don't think is grossly overpaid if he gets his head out of his ass. * Deng, who can play and I think will get a contract about proportionate to his worth. * Gordon, who can play but has a very strange size/skill set that I wouldn't overpay for. We need to move or will lose due to age on: * Nocioni, who's overpaid for a 6th to 7th man, especially with so many 3/4 type guys on the roster. If we pay Gordon to be the 6th man, we will have a hard time paying him to be the 7th. * Smith, who needs to be moved while he's got value. He's got a good contract and he's relatively older than our other guys. Not to say he can't stick around, but he's a stopgap for now when the team's best years are ahead of them. * Wallace, who's taking up a lot of the available salary, can't pull his weight, and worse, thinks he can. We don't know about: * All the young guys, who its just plain unclear how much they can work for us.
ESPN just said the Bulls are certain to make a deal by trade deadline. They mentioned Gasol talks have been renewed and how his back to the game basket, shot blocking, and drawing double teams would be a huge benefit for the Bulls.
I'm not that in favor of firing Paxson yet because, on average, he's still better than the alternatives. Every GM is going to make mistakes, but if you look at Pax's record, it's generally been better than average. I've come to a few conclusions about GMs over the years. 1) The margin for error for building a long-run contending team is VERY small. More than one or two mistakes and you've probably blown a window of opportunity. 2) That being said, it's very possible to evaluate a set of GMs based on a fairly objective criteria. You can't fully evaluate a GM objectively because everyone has different assets to work with. But you can look and see how effective their assets are being used, and you can look at how much they left on the table at draft time relative to their peers. Subjectively, for example, I think but cannot prove Pax should have been able to acquire an additional pick and get Brandon Roy. And pretty much anything we did to get him would have been worth it. But there's not really an objective way to measure that. However, there is an objective way to measure drafting. In the long run, you can look at the guy a GM drafts vs. the guys that are still on the board. The closer your guy is to the best player available, I think on average, that's a good thing. Over time, Pax hasn't been perfect in that regard, but you look at his record vs. someone like Jerry Krause or Rod Thorn, and he's been better than average. You can sort of do the same thing with free agents. If you look at every MLE signing, some have success and some dont. I'd say as an aside, most don't work out, so saying signing Pippen sucked, but objectively it probably didn't suck any worse than signing ERob. Signing Wallace probably sucked worse than signing Drew Gooden or Joel Przybilla though. Point is, you can look at it in terms of dollars spent to get a given amount of production, and over time, that's a relatively objective measure when you compare amongst GMs. And what you really find out is it's like comparing a bunch of blind and drunken bums fighting in the street. Most guys fail to win. Only a few consistently contend, and most GMs don't last long enough to truly get a good fix on whether they will or they won't. Pax is at this point somewhere in the upper middle of the pack. He hasn't done well enough to really make us a top flight team, and I do think he's squandered an opportunity to do so. But again, back to rule one. The margin of error is very small, and he hasn't convinced me that he can't put together a good streak and get us to where we need to go. And in short, that's the criteria I hold for firing a GM. You have to look and think you've got a better shot with a random guy off the street (knowing that out of 30 GM positions, probably only 20% are held by guys who fairly consistently make good moves) will give you a better shot. To put it simply, you've got to reach the conclusion that he's going to squander every opportunity, or not even do well enough to have an opportunity to make the jump in the first place. At this point, I wouldn't say that of Paxson.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rwj @ Jan 16 2008, 03:58 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>None of those moves/non-moves, except for signing Ben Wallace, seem especially bad to me given the circumstances at the time. Hell, at this point you could probably argue that not trading Deng for Kobe or Gasol was a great move - those teams were never going to compete.</div> One major issue with Paxson I have in retrospect is that it's clear now "the circumstances at the time" are largely of his creation. It amazes me that the Bulls seem now to be letting the beat reporters talk about how poor Skiles' relationships with various guys were. Obviously Paxson's job isn't to dictate everything a coach can and can't say, but if he saw this sort of thing going on for that long and didn't do anything about it, well, that's pretty questionable judgement on his part.
