Why Bulls head coach Fred Hoiberg was doomed from the start
Fred Hoiberg’s tenure as the Chicago Bulls head coach has been doomed since it began last season. He replaced a mythical figure in Tom Thibodeau, who won the Coach of the Year award in his first season and didn’t miss the playoffs during his time in Chicago. “The Mayor” had big shoes to fill, and his attempts to bring an uptempo offense to a team that had previously been known to put in most of its work on the defensive end was always going to be a tough fit.
That defensive mindset was something teams in the NBA came to fear during the Thibodeau era, where Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson, Luol Deng and Jimmy Butler made offenses work for every point. Butler and Gibson are the only ones left from that era and the marriage between them and Hoiberg was never going to be easy.
Butler made his feelings clear last year when he said that the players “have to be coached a lot harder” after a loss to New York Knicks. They ultimately made amends later in the season as the team crept toward .500, but his criticism still seems to be floating around Chicago’s locker room.
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Hoiberg’s attempt to get them back to the playoffs hasn’t been helped by the seemingly forever meddling of Chicago’s front office. After they traded Derrick Rose and let Noah walk in free agency, many fans assumed the team would enter tank mode. Butler could be sold for a ton of assets and allow Hoiberg to raise a young group that could implement his system.
But the Mayor had no such luck, with space-clogger Rajon Rondo joining the Bulls after mid-range savant Dwyane Wade decided to return home. Hoiberg was asked to try and turn a roster with only one or two shooters into a playoff contender around the mercurial talents of Butler and one more Wade renaissance.
The early results were good. Wade found his stroke from deep and Butler’s typical late-game heroics were making the Bulls a team to be feared in the East. But the team of the past few weeks — where Chicago failed to show up in a home and home against Milwaukee and looked like a cluttered mess on offense — is what many fans were expecting out of this season.
The return of Doug McDermott, one of Chicago’s only pure shooters, should have taken a bit of pressure off Hoiberg but McDermott’s play simply hasn’t provided enough.
It’d be an interesting choice for the Bulls front office to give up on Hoiberg just two years into his tenure and when they’ve done just about everything possible to make him fail. If anything, the Bulls should try to offload Rondo, give more chances to Jerian Grant and/or Michael Carter-Williams to run the offense and make McDermott the first man off the bench to try and provide some spacing for Butler and Wade to operate in.
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But if Gar Forman and the upper brass keep with the past — an apparent habit of deflecting blame from themselves and placing it on those below — then Hoiberg could be gone before the new year loses its luster. Odds are they’ll bring in another unproven name to run the organization as well.
Hoiberg may not be the perfect man for the Bulls, but who else is really out there that’d take on this flawed a roster? While he hasn’t proven himself in Chicago, Hoiberg has hardly been given a chance to run the system he wants or had the assets to form a reasonable team. If Hoiberg gets canned, Forman is likely next to go and neither’s place will be easily filled.
For now, the Bulls should push through this rough patch and reassess the situation once the season ends.