Butler wants ‘laid-back’ Hoiberg to coach Bulls ‘harder at times’
The Chicago Bulls had a ready-made excuse to drop one on Saturday night. They were tipping off 20 hours removed from a quadruple-overtime loss to the Detroit Pistons in which starting guards Jimmy Butler and Derrick Rose both logged more than 54 minutes of playing time, and about 15 hours after arriving at their hotel following the overnight flight to New York. They were without starting center Pau Gasol, who’d been kept home in Chicago after playing 48 minutes against Detroit.
[Follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
It made all the sense in the world that the Bulls would fall to a New York Knicks team that breezed through its Friday night’s work before making a short trip home from Philadelphia. You chalk it up as a schedule loss, you offer the standard round of cliches about tough-luck back-to-backs, and you look forward to Monday’s home game against the Brooklyn Nets. That’s what Derrick Rose did after the Knicks weathered an early Bull rush and used their superior (read: more rested) depth to take control of the game and earn a 107-91 victory on Saturday night.
“You’re a little fatigued but I feel everybody felt it tonight,” the point guard said after scoring six points on 3-for-10 shooting in 21 minutes, according to Brian Mahoney of The Associated Press. “I think everybody gave it their all, at least what they had, and just didn’t have it tonight.”
That was not, however, what Butler wanted to do. After scoring 12 points on 4-for-11 shooting with five assists and two rebounds in 33 minutes, just one night after popping for a career-high 43 in 55-plus minutes against Detroit, the All-Star shooting guard focused not on fatigue in the players, but on fire from their coach — or, rather, a lack thereof — as a contributing factor in “the low-energy effort,” according to Chris Kuc of the Chicago Tribune:
“I believe in the guys in this locker room but I also believe we probably have to be coached a lot harder at times,” Butler said. “I’m sorry, I know Fred [Hoiberg] is a laid-back guy and I really respect him for that but when guys aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do, you have to get on guys — myself included.”
Hoiberg is in his first season with the Bulls after taking over for the fired Tom Thibodeau, who coached the team for five seasons.
“It’s not even about being coached a certain way for five years, it’s making everybody do their job,” Butler said. “We weren’t doing what we were supposed to be doing. Nobody spoke up about it. I did [but] probably not enough times. I think that [Hoiberg] has to hold everybody accountable from the No. 1 player all the way to how ever many guys we have. Everybody has to do their job. When you match up and do your job, we’ll win the game.”
Butler’s comments seem to be of a peace with remarks underlining the difference between the hard-charging Thibodeau and the comparatively more easygoing Hoiberg in a recent interview with ESPN.com’s Scoop Jackson, although in that conversation, Butler seems to lay his frustration about the inconsistent efforts that have at times plagued Chicago during its 15-10 start to the season at the feet of his teammates:
The frustrating moments last year was kinda like, Thibs just being a hard-nosed guy. He’s gonna yell, he’s gonna say some curse words, he’s going to let you know. With right here, [Hoiberg] is going to be like, “Hey, guys, you gotta do this, you gotta do that,” and then that’s the end of it.
It’s two totally different coaching styles. Some works for some guys, some works for others. Some guys on this roster can’t take getting yelled at, some guys on this roster getting yelled at gets them going, you know what I mean? And there’s nothing wrong with that. But at the end of the day, we as players know what we are capable of and what we have to do. We’re all grown men, and we’ve been playing this game for so long a coach shouldn’t have to tell us, “Hey, this is what you have to do to win this game.”
Scoop: And is that what’s frustrating at times? Is that what you are saying when you come out and make those comments?
Butler: Yeah. We’ve been doing this all of our lives! This is what we love to do. This is what we choose to do. Look, we respect the game, we are in here [practicing] all of the time, we know what it takes to win in this league. You see it every single night. You see Golden State win, you see Cleveland, you see San Antonio, whoever it may be. You gotta play hard, you gotta guard, obviously you have to score, you just have to play hard. And that’s a talent. Playing hard is a talent! And the longer you can play hard, the more you can help your team win.
Butler’s Saturday comments also sound a similar note to one he struck in a recent piece by ESPN.com’s Nick Friedell about the Bulls’ ongoing work to acclimate to their first-year head coach’s style and develop a new identity after a half-decade under Thibs:
After saying before the season that the Bulls would be an “exciting” team, Hoiberg has struggled to get his group to play the way he wants every game. In the process, the Bulls have lost the swagger that comes with playing with the intensity that defined them over the previous five seasons.
“We just get out-toughed sometimes,” Bulls swingman Jimmy Butler [said] recently. “You can call it being soft, whatever you want to call it. I think that’s why [we’re inconsistent]. Some nights we’re the tougher team. The nights that we’re not the tougher team we lose.”
They also raised some eyebrows from those who cover the team:
Whether you view Butler’s comments as pointing toward a larger underlying problem that threatens to jeopardize the Bulls’ standing as a potential conference finalist, or merely consider them the outgrowth of overflowing frustration after a grueling 28-hour period that featured two losses, it’s certainly noteworthy that Butler — who has taken the mantle of Chicago’s best player and “focal point,” as Jackson described him, after earning his first All-Star berth, winning Most Improved Player honors and inking a five-year, $95 million maximum-salary contract last summer — felt the state of the Bulls’ union is unsteady enough to publicly call both his coach and his teammates on the carpet.
The timing feels odd — again, few expected Chicago to give an especially dynamic effort less than 24 hours after playing one of the 13 longest games in NBA history — but then, the Bulls’ old coach always seemed to believe Chicago had more than enough to win, even when that made no sense. He wound up being right a surprising amount of the time (in the regular season, at least), which made him fans and enemies and left a lasting impression on an awful lot of people … including the late first-rounder out of Marquette that he helped turn into an All-Star. From Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times:
“Basketball is basketball,’’ Butler said when asked about the transition from Thibodeau to Hoiberg. “Players are going to play the game. But it’s different. I’m not going to say it’s not.’’
“Different” was supposed to mean “better” for these Bulls — faster, more free-flowing, less life-or-death intense, more fun. After two straight losses and a fairly big matzo ball dropped in the middle of the locker room, though, it doesn’t sound like Chicago’s having very much fun yet.
More NBA coverage:
– – – – – – –
Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
Stay connected with Ball Don’t Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, “Like” BDL on Facebook and follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more.
