I wonder what the Bulls players think of Skiles now in contrast to Jim Boylan. Over the last couple of days we've had Thomas, Duhon and Aaron Gray pop off in one way or another. Last night Noah could be seen unleashing some angry looking back-talk after getting an earful from Boylan. Leading up to the past few days we had various unhappiness expressed from most everyone else. Like this sharply dressed and balding fellow, Scott Skiles might have done a lot of bad things. But my suspicion is that, unlike Boylan, the players have a sense that he knows what he's talking about.
Is it better to think things or to come out and say them? The only difference I can tell is that under Skiles, the players were afraid to speak out.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Especially true when dealing with people. Once things are said, it's nigh on impossible to take them back. If you don't say it and realize you were wrong later, no harm done.
So Patrick Henry should have kept his mouth shut instead of saying "Give me liberty or give me death!" ?
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Denny Crane @ Mar 10 2008, 12:25 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>So Patrick Henry should have kept his mouth shut instead of saying "Give me liberty or give me death!" ?</div> It sort of depends on the stakes, doesn't it? Henry was crossing a line he couldn't go back to anyway and enlisting support for a literal revolution. The Bulls are a mediocre basketball team whose players don't appear bold or sophisticated enough to organize successful objections to an old man wearing a headband or a lame duck coach. In the pantheon of revolutionaries, they're somewhere south of The Judean People's Front.
LOL Ever read Tom Peterson's "In Search of Excellence?" How does speaking up square with "Excellence" in organizations? Would the Bulls qualify as such an organization? My answer is "no" to the last question, and that's been my gripe all along.
I'm too busy trying to be excellent to read books about being excellent But seriously, I haven't read it but I laid out my sort of "vision" for how to manage people over in the Aaron Gray thread. I find that speaking out in the context of an NBA team is very rarely a good thing. It's yet another symptom of losing and either a lack of plan or lack of successful execution by management. It's more feedback that things are a mess. That being said, I don't see anything constructive to come out of it. I don't need Aaron Gray snapping at the coach to know this is a train wreck. I don't see any real attempt to create order out of chaos from any of these guys. That's not to say it's necessarily possible to do so, but I'd rather see that than everyone chipping in that much more chaos.
"Excellent" companies / organizations aren't top down mandated policies. The employees/workers are encouraged to speak up, speak out, and come up with their own proposals. An excellent company he uses as an example is Boeing. One of their most successful planes was designed on the back of a napkin (literally) at lunch by some lower level employees. It isn't exactly the inmates running the asylum, but it is workers speaking up and management being receptive to what they have to say. Seems to me that when people do speak up, and management ignores them, the situation devolves into what we see of the Bulls.
Well sure, that's part of having a good environment. But in the grand scheme of things how might we fit that into the Bulls? You've got, like most NBA teams, 15 guys whose main suggestion is that if you just play them 40 minutes a night everything will be OK. Those suggestions become a lot harder to deal with when you're losing because it appears to everyone there's nowhere to go but up. But the biggest problem is that at Boeing any one guy's success can translate into very real terms for success for others. In the NBA, if you follow Kirk Hinrich's advice that he plays better with a tall guard, Ben Gordon is screwed. And if you follow Ben Gordon's advice that he plays better with a guy who slashes to the basket, Kirk Hinrich is screwed. And even when one of those guys is right, it's difficult to acquire and get rid of the right fitting guys. And it's difficult to find the right coaches. So beyond a few things that are more or less common sense (yeah, you should listen to guys, figure out how they like to play, and acknowledge when they've got a good idea), I think the majority of player complaints are probably not very productive.
I don't think those are the main gripes. Hinrich's better gripe is that he's not seeing time in Q4 of a lot of games lately.
It's not the specific gripe, it's the general nature of things. Fine, put Hinrich in the 4th and who sits? Gordon? Hughes? Deng?
The coaching staff is sad, they need to rehaul it and maybe actually get coaches that can use the talent on the roster. Heck get Larry Brown in here...
Notwithstanding all I've said above, a group walkout by the Bulls who've been screwed around by Paxson and Boylan and their contradictory messages this year would be pretty entertaining.
