I rise here in defense of John Paxson.
Is anyone with me? I can’t hear you.
The Bulls return home Friday to face the Golden State Warriors after another ho-hum .500 road trip. We all know the old formula: Play .500 on the road and take care of business at home, and you have 50 victories.
This Bulls team won’t get 50 victories, as many of us thought it would. And it will undergo some changes, as it should.
Much of the recent frustration has focused on Ben Wallace, who dominated the Joakim Noah episode. It’s about the only dominating he has done here since he became the highest-paid free agent in Bulls history.
I’d like to see some intellectual honesty here, though that’s something of an oxymoron when it comes to sports fans and the media.
When the Bulls signed Wallace, he was the reigning NBA Defensive Player of the Year.
He had won the award four times and was coming off a Game 7 loss in the NBA Finals with the Pistons.
He was replacing Tyson Chandler, then the object of fan fury. Chandler, the conventional wisdom held, was mentally weak and always in foul trouble, accounting for a huge disparity in free throws.
He couldn’t shoot and was shrinking by the day under the demands of coach Scott Skiles, then a folk hero for demanding accountability.
It’s no coincidence that Chandler’s increased production with the Hornets comes while playing with a great point guard, Chris Paul. It makes all the difference for big men.
With contract extensions coming, 2006 was the last summer the Bulls would be under the salary cap. The alternative big men available were Nazr Mohammed and Joel Przybilla.
The signing of Wallace and subsequent trade of Chandler were widely praised.
And it worked, even if Wallace wasn’t quite what he had been. He had left his heart in Auburn Hills.
But the Bulls swept the defending champion Heat and lost to the Pistons in six games in last season’s playoffs, certainly a step in the right direction. Many then picked them for this season’s Finals.
But it hasn’t worked out. So the Wallace signing — the right thing to do then — is now the wrong thing?
“Hey, they’re paid to know,” one might say.
It’s much easier to pick the winners when the race is over.
Sometimes it doesn’t work when everyone thought it would. Who had the Bulls 15-22 near the midway point? Come on, Scott Skiles can’t see you.
I would not have fired Skiles on Christmas Eve, but we all knew it was inevitable. If Luol Deng and Ben Gordon had accepted those $10 million annual extensions and hadn’t increased the pressure on themselves to produce, would it have come so quickly? Who knows?
I would recommend Skiles for another job in a second.
He fixes your mess, like many of the best ones: Larry Brown, Doug Collins, Hubie Brown, Don Nelson.
The tough part is being his successor, because those coaches need teams built around the way they coach. They’ll make it work, but they don’t sustain because they want change, and the players usually get their way when change is demanded.
As much as you might like to believe otherwise, the NBA has always been something of an inmates-running-the-asylum league.
Magic Johnson was going to quit unless they fired his coach. They did.
Would Collins still have coached the Bulls if Michael Jordan had objected?
The champion Lakers agreed they’d had enough of Pat Riley, and he was back on TV. As Chuck Daly always said, “I appreciate that they let me coach them.”
The players, right or wrong, had reached the end with Skiles, Wallace in particular.
The irony is Paxson tried to build the Bulls so these things wouldn’t happen. Thus the mantra about character and accountability. Get players who were mature, who had been in good college programs and even if they didn’t project as stars, you’d get an honest night’s work every night.
And you did. Until now. This was a much-admired Bulls team, if hardly anyone believed it was championship material.
Just those little things.
The Bulls went for Tyrus Thomas, I believe, because they didn’t have a great athlete who projected as a star. So it was time to take a chance. It looks like a miss now, though I haven’t given up on Thomas and would like to see him get regular playing time. With some strength, he might be productive at power forward.
While starting for Kirk Hinrich the last two games, Thabo Sefolosha is showing he might be a serviceable shooting guard, one who actually can shoot, if not be coached by Skiles.
Now we know why the Swiss are neutral. They don’t like confrontation.
Noah was the right pick. Players selected after him were Spencer Hawes, Acie Law, Thaddeus Young, Julian Wright and Al Thornton. Which of them would you rather have? Noah is going to be the best of them. One day he will be starting for Wallace.
The plan with Wallace, really, was to get two good years out of him, have him tutor a young big man a third season and then move him to a team looking to get under the salary cap. It looks like the Bulls got one good season instead. By next season Noah could have his spot, which might be why the two have been clashing.
It’s unlikely to happen now because Jim Boylan has cast his fate with the veterans and is going to try to ride that to having the interim label removed. But he is giving Sefolosha more time and looks to be moving Noah up in the rotation.
Deng, Hinrich and Ben Gordon are still valued around the NBA. As Rick Pitino says, “Jordan’s not walking through the door, Pippen’s not walking though the door, Grant’s not walking through the door.” Rodney McCray isn’t, either, but that’s OK.
Hey, Joe Smith was a good acquisition.
Look, it’s not as we all expected it with the Bulls, but it’s not as bad as it seems.
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sasmith@tribune.com
