From a team perspective, the team has a negative differential between OFF EFF and DEF EFF. Right now its at -1. http://espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/teamstats Last year with basically the same roster under Thibs, the team was a +3.2. http://espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/teamstats/_/year/2015 Even more troubling is to see how much poorer some players are playing under Hoiball this season than under Thibs last season. Most troubling Derrick Rose PER Last Year: 15.9 PER This Year: 12.4 Former MVP went from being a decent NBA player last season to a bad one this year. Nikola Mirotic PER Last Year: 17.9 PER This Year: 14.5 Promising rookie last season with a close to 18 PER. This year he's below average. What a dropoff. Taj Gibson PER Last Year: 16.1 PER This Year: 14.6 The always solid Taj under Thibs has been a below average NBA player under Hoiball. Tony Snell PER Last Year: 10.2 PER This Year: 6.8 This promising D and 3 guy has turned into a really bad NBA player under Hoiberg. Another younger asset moving in the wrong direction. A bit worse Joakim Noah PER Last Year: 15.3 PER This Year: 14.2 Worse under Hoiberg. Also hurt under Hoiberg. Aaron Brooks PER Last Year: 14.4 PER This Year: 12.2 Our instant offense guy is now a bad NBA player under Hoiball. No DJ / Nate signing this year. No Thibs. About the same Jimmy Butler PER Last Year: 21.3 PER This Year: 21.9 Playing great and an all-star level talent. Still leading the league in MPG though under Hoiberg / Swanson / GarPax and now he has hurt his knee. Pau Gasol PER Last Year: 22.7 PER This Year: 22.3 Not a stout defender by any stretch, but still delivering the good at an all-star level at an advanced age. E'Twaun Moore PER Last Year: 10.3 PER This Year: 10.9 Decent bench guard. Doing about the same. Big Winner Doug McDermott PER Last Year: 6.1 PER This Year: 9.0 Big uptick in production for Dougie. He's been freed from the shackles of Thibs. Problem is that 9.0 is absolutely awful, especially for a guy that is supposed to be an offense first guy. Flawed judgement by many. Better, but who cares Kirk Hinrich PER Last Year: 6.8 PER This Year: 7.5 Hoiball agrees with him. Ha. He's going to turn into dust, wraps, gear and glasses at some point in a game this season. Cameron Baristow PER Last Year: 2.1 PER This Year: 3.5 Freed from Thibs. Oy vey, what a mess. So many key players doing worse under Hoiberg. Noone meaningful doing better. And last season was supposed to be the year where Thibs "lost the team." If last season was "lost the team" what do you call this?
The injuries have been rough, but the team simply isn't responding to Hoiberg. It's ugly and I'm getting sad.
The biggest disappointment to me is Fred inability to control player minutes. The largest reason why I thought Thibodeau should have been fired is that he relentlessly overplayed the top of his roster, shortening the careers of Luol Deng, Joakim Noah, and most of all, Derrick Rose. Those were three all-stars, three cornerstones of an elite franchise, when healthy. Out with the old; in with the new. And now we have Hoiberg, who is doing the same damn thing, and letting Jimmy Butler derail his career by leading the league in minutes. If you're going to let your only win-because-of player set his own terms like that, then the rest of this is all theater.
we said that the team stopped responding to Thibs last season. So in defense of Hoiberg, one can say this team has dipped the last two seasons. We will know one way or the other if Hoiberg is part of the problem this season once changes are made in the roster.
I strongly suspect that player minutes distribution are OK with the front office. I wasn't a critic of Thibodeau over minutes so I'm not going after Hoiberg on this. My problem with Hoiberg is much more fundamental. It looks to me like several key players have decided that they can't hear Hoiberg very well. In the NBA, this is typically a hanging offense for head coaches. Then again, this form of player deafness seldom occurs in a head coach's first year of a 5-year contract. It's a bit of a dilemma. One potentially novel approach would be to let the players know that the coach is staying and the deaf players will be removed. It'd be a pretty revolutionary thing to do for a rookie head coach, though. Guess I'll just stay tuned.
It really shouldn't be a dilemma. This franchise went up in value $300M last year. It should drop $25M to ax a coach who isn't passing muster without giving it a second thought.
I don't expect any in-season coaching or front office changes. If the team continues its current slide, this will be lots of fun since fans will have another 2+ months to lose their minds. If things continue to break bad for the team, Forman would be gone and Hoiberg's fate would be in Paxson's hands (Paxson would probably offer his resignation, but the Reinsdorfs probably wouldn't accept it since Paxson is their ONLY trusted basketball guy).
