Sam Smith

It was about 30 games ago that Pat Riley seemed envious. He was watching his Miami Heat being swept in the NBA playoffs by the Chicago Bulls, a team that hustled, worked hard, committed to defense first. It was a team that moved player and ball, everything right about basketball. You got the sense Riley wished he was coaching that team instead of his aging, plodding band. Before considering his own team’s humiliation, Riley was effusive about the coaching of the Bulls’ Scott Skiles, calling him one of the brightest minds in the NBA.

Riley can have him as coach now if he chooses, and the way it is going in Miami it’s hard to imagine Riley putting up with the team any longer or they putting up with him.

But that’s a column soon to come.

Life changes quickly in the NBA, and if life with the Bulls can be summed up in a paragraph, it’s probably that Skiles decided he couldn’t take his little, overachieving team any farther and management respectfully disagreed.

This is what goes on just about everywhere in the NBA except Salt Lake City.

After all, wasn’t it just a few years ago that Phil Jackson said Kobe Bryant was uncoachable? Actually wrote it down in case everyone didn’t believe what they heard.

The bad ones come and go quickly. The good ones, like Skiles, come and make the team better, and then after awhile they grow disenchanted that their players actually are human beings.

It’s the Larry Brown Syndrome, something of the opposite of the Stockholm Syndrome when the captives became enamored with their captors. In the Brown Syndrome, the coach rejects his captives and changes jobs.

Skiles is about to. He’s too good a coach to stay out too long.

But he has these fundamental disagreements with management. He doesn’t always agree its players are good enough and says so. Management says it’s his job to help them improve. He says he’s not a magician.

Something like this went on in Phoenix, where Skiles took a listing team to the second round of the playoffs and consecutive playoff appearances before being fired. Critics say he quit on the team. Supporters say he simply was being honest in saying the team couldn’t get any better and there was little anyone could do about it. After all, they had Stephon Marbury.

And so it was in Chicago.

It appeared to be a different Skiles this season, seemingly less enthusiastic and even demanding. The message the players believed they were getting was that he didn’t think them good enough to go beyond where they had, a second round loss to the Pistons last spring, and perhaps not even that far. It’s hardly reason to be proud, but it seemed to become a tit-for-tat.

OK, you don’t believe in us; we’re not playing for you.

It wasn’t obvious or verbalized. It just seemed to be a creeping disinterest, little life among the players. It hardly should have kept anyone from making shots, but they didn’t. There were games they competed and games they didn’t. There were distractions discussed, like Ben Gordon and Luol Deng rejecting eight-figure annual contract extensions and seeming to regret it immediately. There was the daily media reports at the end of training camp of the imminent arrival of Kobe Bryant in Chicago for most of the players, a prospect I personally didn’t understand — have you ever spent the winter in Chicago?

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But the conventional wisdom was that it upset the players.

It shouldn’t have as for three years they were celebrated for being tough, determined, hard playing athletes who had good character and cared about the game. It was a team better than the sum of its parts, which perhaps was why there was a ceiling. They played so hard all season they could catch teams napping and win a lot of games. When the playoffs came, other teams got more serious and raised their games. The Bulls had nowhere to go because they treated the regular season more seriously.

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Not this season, and management wasn’t ready to concede.

The belief was that Skiles was ready, at least with this group. Thus the early demise.

The Bulls schedule softens up some in the next few weeks and only Boston and Detroit really have separated themselves in the East. General manager John Paxson never said he had a championship team, but said if he could accumulate pieces and make a deal, then perhaps there were possibilities.

But suddenly the pieces were losing value in the losing. The youngsters who were supposed to make a difference this season, Tyrus Thomas, Thabo Sefolosha and Joakim Noah, came in and out of the rotation. Skiles stuck with his core of Gordon, Deng, Kirk Hinrich and Ben Wallace even when they didn’t produce. Players quietly began to question the accountability mantra. And then suddenly the blowouts came, trailing by at least 20 in three of the last six games, the home fans booing, the team lifeless.

It came Christmas Eve, though it was coming from the opening of the season, a scenario that’s played out countlessly around pro sports. It’s difficult to cast blame. Skiles believed he was telling the truth and the Bulls couldn’t handle it. The Bulls believed he accepted a convenient truth of his own that ran at odds with everything this team had accomplished and the way it performed with the same personnel just months previous.

It just was time.

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