Change....

Where was all the scrap the whole team talk preseason?  Obviously, we all had very high hopes going into 2007-8.  Skiles did a great job of what he was hired to do, but lost the team this year and was given plenty of time to correct the matter but couldn't.  Boylan may or may not be the guy to come up with the innovation that maxes out their assets, but selling off your stocks when the market bottoms out is NOT a winning plan.
   Young bigs seem to need about 6 years of development post high school to hit their prime.  They all look so much better against college competition than against NBA bigs, and I'm guessing that this is just a simple matter of the quantum leap involved in all sports when one changes levels.  You are so physically dominant at one level that poor fundamentals don't hamper you at all.  At the next level, EVERYONE is physically your equal and better, and they've years ahead of you mentally.  Some recognize the need for coaching, some back off and settle for mediocrity.  This puts us 3-4 years away from even finding out what kind of players TT and Noah will be.  Think of where Curry and Chandler are now vs 3 years ago.  If Curry wasn't such a lazy bastard, he could easily have become a top 3 center.  But I even heard Red Auerbach talk about the impossibility of predicting the work ethic kids will have after they get the money.  He even said that Bird's notorious dedication wasn't a given.  
   So, apart from a manic-depression reaction to the unexpected fall off this year, how should the Bulls go forward?  Energizing the people they've got seems like priority one.  Boylan?  Seems like there's better effort, so maybe we're going in the right direction.  I wonder if we have the right assistants to develop the kids.  LA has Kareem working with Bynum; Houston had Hakeem helping Yao.  Pip seems to want to be a part of the Bulls, but I think he's delusional in thinking he ought to be a head coach.  I'd like to see Rodman give it a try (he's broke, so I assume available).  Goofball that he was off the court, he was perhaps the smartest player on the court I ever saw.  Unlike the usual 6-9 month learning curve that most vets had to "get" the triangle, Snake came in and played it beautifully immediately.  His fitness regimen was great, and you know he outwitted some of the greatest of all time came gametime.  Can you imagine TT and Noah playing Snake ball for us in 3 years?
   Longley was another player that I thought over achieved his talent by understanding the game.  Harper also was brilliant at disrupting what the best PG's in the game wanted to do.  These guys understood the game, and didn't stop the Dream Teamers, they just contained them enough to stop them from beating us.  If you really look at that 72 win team, they weren't necessarily physically dominant across the board, but as a unit, they had an answer for anything an opponent wanted to do offensively or defensively.  I still laugh when I think of Worm dropping 2 straight 3's on Malone.  Brilliant!
   No, rather than making the same mistake they did with Chandler, I'd say Pax needs to beat the bushes and find someone else who's fed up with waiting for a kid to grow up; a Billups or a Baron.  This isn't a team that CAN'T win; they just can't run with the best and so far this year, they've played discouraged.  The right coach could perform a Golden State type of turnaround.  The game seems to be favoring strategies that take advantage of the natural tendencies of And 1 aggressiveness of today's kids.  I'm thinking of D'Antoni, Nelson, Calipari.  The Spurs team discipline is the exception.  These kids want to be on Sportscenter and position themselves for the big money.  I love PhilJax, but after 10 years, he still has trouble selling the team game to Kobe.  Even he conceded and gives them a 7 second window to create a shot before settling into a half court game.  
   Been watching the Beloved since day one, gang.  I've seen some real shit teams.  This isn't one of them.  I've got to think that this Blog (thanks Matt) is read by most of them and influences the team's mood.  This year could be just a setback, or maybe Detroit undressed them last year and something dramtic is needed.  Either way, this blog should be supporting our Bulls.  I mean how do you go from "In Pax We Trust" to fire the a-hole in 25 games?  He's a very heady NBA vet; do you have any idea how heads and shoulders that puts him above our understanding of the game?  Like I said, I don't know what the capabilities are of player development, but we've got a lot of talent to work with.  We're not winning any titles this year, and that's why I suggested we go to a 2 unit game.  We've got to be willing to lose a few games right now to get some useful PT for the players that need to arrive for us to go anywhere with this group.  A predictable substitution pattern would give more players a defined role and, I think, a better team atmosphere.  I don't want to see them deteriorate into every man for himself chaos, and the blame game is the quickest way to get there.  They screwed up 2 OT games against good teams.  Learn and move on.  If everyone turns on them, they'll lose their huevos, and you've got have audacity to run with the big boys.  Go Bulls!

sorry.  That wasn't much of a revision from my second option in my original post.

Regardless, I think they deal looks fair from both ends.  We may need to get Hakim Warrick back in the deal for another SF/PF that we can use off the bench.  That deal does work in the trade machine Including Warrick

I know Matt said it may be hard to get Memphis to give us their 1st round pick.  The only argument I have to that is that the Grizz would be getting 2 lottery picks from the past two years from us and they may want to start spacing their 1st rnd pick salaries.  In other words, if we exchange our 1st rnd '09 pick with their 1st rnd '08 pick, the Grizz can delay having to money up a 1st rnder from '08 and use that money on signing some of their current young players like Gay and Conley to an extension