Everyone knows Vinny Del Negro's story now. He's the totally inexperienced guy John Paxson put a sort of blind faith into before the season, a blind faith that has ultimately resulted in the same record to this point as last season (for which the far-more-effective Scott Skiles was eventually fired). Del Negro is apparently clueless. He's arguing with players and fining them and generally showing little idea how to handle a team either in the locker room or in front of a clipboard, and the Bulls are wasting their young talent as a result.
Everyone knows this. The question is whether the Bulls know it, whether they're as ready to end the Del Negro era as most fans. It would be a hasty firing, to be sure, but one that might be necessary all the same, as the always-interesting Blog a Bull writes:
How many games are Paxson and Reinsdorf willing to lose? We can pretend to be the smarter, 'long-view', fans and realize that this team is a first-round exit at their absolute best, so what's the harm in a few more lottery balls. But there's a difference between a gutted rebuilding team and what we should be seeing this year. This is an absolute embarrassment. And going on nearly a season and a half of it. This s--t cannot stand. I don't care if it means ultimately nothing in the way of championship-building: I just want to see relatively good basketball again.
There are two places to be in the NBA. One is in the lottery. At the very least, you can have some sort of hope toward building a franchise, toward landing another Derrick Rose-type player. The other place to be is in championship contention. The Bulls are in that weird middle ground right now, where they're playing bad enough basketball to clearly be wasting talent, but not bad enough that they've been able to sink into the lottery. They're in no-man's-land. And as a wise, wise man once said, "In the land of the skunk, the man with half a nose is king." Haha. We have no idea what that means. It's just a funny Chris Farley quote. Sorry.
ANYWAY. The Bulls are bad. They don't want to fire Vinny. In a perfect world, neither would we. We get it. But if things continue this way, they might not have a choice.
