05-14-2008, 06:47 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Moderator
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Wisconsin
Posts: 5,791
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Rick Morrissey: Bulls need Players who Care
Quote:
Forget about getting the right coach.
What we have to question now is whether the Bulls have the right group of players' moms.
If you saw the way LeBron James' mother jumped to defend her son Monday night, you know what I'm talking about. If you didn't see it, think of a terrier attempting to attach itself to the leg of a mailman.
In the first half of Game 4 of the Boston-Cleveland playoff series, the Celtics' Paul Pierce stopped James from scoring by dragging him into the seats under the basket, near where James' mother was sitting. Gloria James got up, tried to get into the fray and was held back by Boston's Kevin Garnett. James yelled at her to sit down.
I would like to yell at the Bulls to sign her up. She looked like she had more heart than their entire roster. All right, that's not fair. Maybe half the roster.
And that's the Bulls' biggest problem. Not moms, but sons. And it's not a lack of talent, because there is a decent amount on this Bulls team. It's that the players are—how to put this delicately?—delicate.
No one can say Ben Gordon and Luol Deng are short on ability. But it's not overstating things to say the two are easily affected by distractions, if the definition of "easily affected" is "crawls into a hole at the first hint of difficulty."
The great ones put aside their worries and frustrations when they step on the floor. Gordon and Deng, along with Kirk Hinrich, seemed to be almost paralyzed by the Kobe Bryant trade rumors early in the season. And Gordon and Deng seemed discombobulated by their contract situations.
So it's reasonable to ask if we now can expect the two of them to be in a funk because the team didn't hire Mike D'Antoni to coach the team. The former Suns coach and new Knicks coach is a dream for any player who likes to run. Gordon and Deng like to run.
And now he's gone, even though he was never here. Will the two of them cling to a ghost?
We should have known the Bulls were in trouble when Joakim Noah stood up and pointed out the team's lack of fire—trouble because they had played only four games at that point and trouble because he was a rookie.
"Every game we play is like, 'Oh, wait till we play the next one. We'll be all good. We're going to kill them the next game,' " he said after making his pro debut. "That's not how it works."
Some of us might not think Noah is much of a player, but there's no question the kid cares. The Bulls could use a few more of him. Even former coach Scott Skiles, as perturbed as he might have been by Noah's public thoughts, agreed with them.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...,2483833.story
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