to be considered for the head coaching job. Besides playing the vets which we all know will make the playoffs. SIKE

I think benching Hinrich for Duhon is one of the most perplexing things any team I have been a fan of has ever done.  Not the dumbest thing, not the craziest thing, but simply the most mind-boggling thing I can remember.  There is simply no point in benching Hinrich at this point.  Do the people who manage the Bulls know that the team that scores the most points wins?  Or that we have made Nocioni the first option on our team.  Think about that.  Noce, in the span of one year, has gone from our 4th option to our first.   This is progress?  When Du said Boylan was more of the same, I took it with a grain of salt.  But now?  Boylan must have been giving Skiles the worst advise in assistant coaching history.  

This whole mess needs to land right on Paxson's door step.  I challenge anyone, anyone to find one NBA person who believes Hinrich should back up Du.  What a complete waste of a season.

is that it's partly a reaction to Kirk's comments the other day about how much easier he's got it playing next to Thabo.

I got shit for pointing that out, but those were not "innocuous" comments.  

You generally don't hear players talking about how playing with certain teammates is better than playing with others for a good reason.  It's not a good way to get on someone's good side.  That's especially true when you're talking about guys in their contract years.

So perhaps seeing this poor behavior, Boylan decided to put poor, put-upon Kirk in his place.

I mean, it beats the hell out of me, but some form of punishment for that recent screw up (or perhaps something else we're not aware of?) is the only thing that even remotely makes sense.  On the court he'd actually come around a bit from his crappy production for most of the year.

The juxtaposition of those quotes with his benching and last night's humiliation at the hands of Paul was pretty notable too.  If you look at the sequence of things, you've got Kirk going out and dropping the "I play with midgets and do much better guarding PGs" excuse, sitting to start the game, and then giving it away over the last 6 minutes or so when Paul pretty much demolished him.

Now obviously Paul is a heck of a player, but Kirk was just saying how much better off he is defending short guys. And his claim to fame is he's supposed to be a heck of a defender.  All-NBA second team.  And he came out and sucked something fierce.

may be mentally deficient?

There is no rhyme nor reason to his substitution patterns. He abandons lineups that are successful early in games. He stubbornly keeps ineffective lineups on the court. He maintains no consistency from game to game. Each game is its own miniature season, completely unrelated to what has come before and what will come after. His rotation is paradoxically both unpredictable and preordained. It's as if he concocts a unique rotation for each game based on match-up advantages that are invisible to the rest of humanity, then doggedly implements that rotation regardless of how the game is actually progressing.

I have no idea what is going on within the franchise, but this club is dysfunctional. It's infuriating.

in a big ocean, or it's just their way to decreetly tank the season?  

of who he plays (and who he doesn't) this (http://myespn.go.com/nba/truehoop) is the main problem crippling the Bulls way towards success (and apparently may have been the problem those past few years).

They can't properly develop their young players (or at least the bigs).

Interview of an hornets'assistant :

Q: Tyson Chandler looks so much more assertive and sure of himself now.
A: [Assistant coach] Kenny Gattison has been doing an outstanding job with Tyson, working on his game. And he's a competitor. He's got a great heart -- just so competitive. You can ask him to do anything and he buys in totally.

Tyson is really comfortable with the coaching staff. In Chicago, his relationship with Scott Skiles was non-existent, and Tyson got a little timid. Byron [Scott] actually had to threaten to fine Tyson money to get him to try to score some more.

When he first came here, if he got an offensive rebound, he always wanted to pass it out. Byron told him to dunk, or go up hard to try and score. It was programmed into him not to make a move, not to score. It happened in a game once, and Byron jumped up and subbed for him, and told him that if he is under the hoop with the ball, he needs to dunk, no matter what happened in Chicago. "You better start trying to score this ball," he said. And his confidence started growing to the point that now he's a nice double double guy.