coldfish wrote:Random comments:
- There have been a small number of people here who have pointed out Derrick's flaws since the beginning. At times, those people were e-shouted down and labeled haters. Now it seems that more people are seeing these flaws and quite frankly, are overreacting. Derrick's problems now are no different than his issues last year or even in college.
- If anything, that's my biggest problem with Derrick. He hasn't improved much. I don't know who his personal advisors are, but they haven't helped him much. I remember seeing offseason workout videos where Derrick was working on alley oop dunks and putbacks. Hopefully that was just a small practice highlight video and not his routine. I really don't think he is lazy, it just seems that he doesn't know how to improve. Someone really smart needs to sit down with Derrick and tell him how to become an effective NBA player. I don't even mean the big stuff, but the little things that fans don't even discuss, like footwork.
- All that being said, I always said in DWade threads that if you get DWade, you try to trade Rose for an elite big. I stand by that and now people may be getting the reason why.
- In summary, the Bulls shouldn't even consider dumping Rose. What they should do is completely re-think how they are handling him and how they are stocking the team. Derrick isn't a half court player and it seems that JR specifically wants to see a half court, defense first grind it out team.
The biggest difference, IMO, in the team that I see is that they tried to slow the pace and pack it in to improve the defense and the rebounding. It worked at first, really well actually, but now it isn't. They basically sacrificed offense for defense and ended up with neither.
If I was Vinny, I would ignore management and go back to the run, run, run team of last year. Remember, post trade the Bulls won games by an average of 110 to 102 or something. Now they can't score 90. Giving up 20 on offense isn't all Gordon. Vinny: "Listen JR, I tried it your way. It didn't work. I know you are going to fire me soon, so I'm not even going to listen to you. If I am going out, its going to be my way and that's to push the ball."
Bulls pace this year is 90.9 or 26th in the NBA
Last year 93.1 or 10th in NBA.
Well, if we are going to rub things in people's faces, I'll point out that:
- Since this post was made, the Bulls jacked up their pace a lot. They are now 13th in the NBA for the season and have been playing at a top 10 pace for a month. That helped.
- Vinny finally talked to Derrick about free throws and Derrick listened.
Derrick still needs to work on a 3 point shot, his defense, his passing and his ability to draw fouls. However, he has noticeably worked on his one biggest concern for being a star, which was his aggressiveness. It doesn't matter what skills you have if you won't use them. To that end, I think the Bulls accidentally did Derrick a favor by creating such a bad team around Rose. They put him in a position where if he doesn't play hard and play well all game long, the Bulls are going to get destroyed.
IMO, there are multiple things important to getting a star next offseason. One of the biggest if getting Derrick to the point where stars want to play with him. That all star spot for Derrick is sooooo important in this regard.
