In one of the more cold-blooded moves in recent history, the Chicago Bulls fired head coach Scott Skiles on Christmas Eve. The idea, presumably, was to change the contentious team culture and eventually turn things around.
Granted, the post-Skiles era is only a game old, but things don’t appear to have changed all that much in the Windy City: The Bulls are still losing; Ben Gordon is still inexplicably coming off the bench. And B.G. can’t believe it either.
“I definitely didn’t see this coming,” Gordon said.
“Ben wants to be a starter,” [newly minted head coach Jim Boylan] said. “But he understands at this point everybody needs to sacrifice. If we do that, it gives us better balance and hopefully the lulls we go through in certain stretches can be negated by having extra firepower.”
I’ve never understood the logic behind this: The Chicago Bulls are an offensively crippled team, yet they insist on bringing their best scorer off the bench, thereby reducing his opportunities to put the ball in the hole.
If they’re going to stick with Skiles’s deranged mentality through and through, why did they bother firing him?
