A Clippers fan asking about Vinny

Well, you should probably know that this community was pretty ruthless on VDN for the whole time he was here. To your credit, at least you are hiring an experienced coach with two years of playoffs under his belt. We hired a “likeable front office guy with a bright future” and we suffered through some growing pains.

X & O’s: Vinny is pretty terrible. There’s not much creativity and supposedly we had the fewest offensive plays in the league. Strangely, the Bulls surrounded Vinny with two former head coaches and an assistant with about a billion years experiences. You’d have thought, between them, they could have created some play that worked. In fairness to Vinny… He didn’t have a single player with reliable post moves, and didn’t have one reliable 3 point shooter. I guess your options become limited.

Game Manager: Year 1 – disaster. If he saw his shadow, he’d call a timeout. Arguably he cost us a playoff series against Boston by not saving a timeout to advance the ball in the final seconds. Year 2 – Huge improvement. In fairness, he had a shallow bench in year 2 as we were more interested in shedding salary for this ongoing Lebron spectacle than creating a deep team.

Motivation: People can complain about Vinny, but players seem to respond to him. He got excellent effort from all but a few, and not getting effort from Tyrus Thomas, Coach Killer Extraordinaire, is hardly a reason to place blame.

Pace: He favors an uptempo game, though he may have been coaching to the Bulls personnel, and undersized team with a lighting quick point guard.

Press Conferences: Snoozers… He’s never met a cliche he didn’t commit to memory and utilize ad nauseum.

Results: In his first year, he pretty much got what was expected. He coached an average team to a 41-41 record. He played young players and we saw a lot of improvement in them. In Year 2, even the biggest Vinny haters have to tip their caps to him. Talk about having the deck stacked against you: 1) Your leading scorer (Ben Gordon) leaves without compensation, During the year, a decent wingman (Johh Salmons) is traded for what amounts to at best a bottom of rotation player (Hakim Warrick) and Tyrus Thomas, an enigma in raw talent who is always tantalizingly close to putting it together is traded for Ronald Flip Murray and his 33% 3pt proficiency. His star point guard is hobbled at the beginning of the season for about 15 games, and later misses more games. His emerging star center gets a chronic case of walking on pins and needles (because I’m too lazy to look up spelling of plantar fa???as) and misses a bunch of games and has his minutes limited in more. We suffer some other injuries, and because of our shallow bench, it’s so bad, Vinny is forced to play AARP member Lindsey Hunter and some guy they must have stopped the bus for on the way to the stadium who was practicing his half court falling out of bounds jumpers with “Pargo” on the back of his jersey. And through it all, we manage to finish 41-41 again. Some will argue, it’s more a testament to the emergence of Rose and Noah. Can’t argue that those players improvements most greatly contributed to our modest success last year but doesn’t a head coach deserve a little credit when his young players perform? .

Player Loyalty: On his way out the door, most Bulls had good public things to say about him, but nobody went to the mat for him. I haven’t read of any further griping about him, so I assume he was reasonably respected in the locker room, though nobody confused him with Red Auerbach.

Fan Loyalty: Who cares? it will be about 2nd quarter of our first game before we turn on our new coach for not having what we think is the right facial expression during a time out. Such is the nature of the beast.

Goodluck. A lot of us are hoping Griffin comes back strong.