Paxson only has himself to blame after taking so long on Skiles

The only shock is that Scott Skiles didn't resign.

If I had a nickel for every time in the last month I told someone Skiles would quit, I'd have like three bucks today, but I also was wrong because he got fired instead, six years to the day after Tim Floyd got a Christmas Eve reprieve.

On the other hand, I'd rather have a dollar for every time I told someone in the spring of 2005 that the Bulls should have let Skiles walk when he was unhappy with their contract offer and brought back Phil Jackson, resurrecting his Point B to Point C routine, with a team full of young players already worn down by Skiles' scowls and screams.

Instead, Skiles was overpaid and the Bulls under-performed.

You wonder what's left of the roster after having their development so delayed by a coach whose style emanated from the 1950s and whose scheme geminated from the 1960s.

After all that, the next coach might not fare any better.

It's up to GM John Paxson to find someone who can salvage these players before Paxson is forced to make his most serious, long-term player-personnel decisions.

And, of course, a lot of this is on Paxson for his indecision and inability to pull the trigger on deals for Kevin Garnett and Pau Gasol, giving them the low-post presence that might already have pushed the Bulls to the NBA Finals.

Now, who knows?

Let's be clear that Paxson did a fine job cleaning up a mess, and that Skiles restored order to the chaos that was the Bulls' roster when the two formed a team and brought dignity back to the organization.

However, it was only Skiles' job to coach, and it was Paxson's to see that the team had tuned out the coach as long as two years ago, when players wondered if working hard for Skiles was still worth it.

They made the right choice and continued to play for each other, despite their despair over having to play for Skiles.

That's not on Skiles.

With apologies to Jack Nicholson, he runs his unit how he runs his unit.

He wasn't going to change. He was coaching the only way he knew how, and it was up to Paxson to realize it wasn't working.

But he didn't, so Skiles went on with his bizarre rotations, his East-West offense, yo-yo substitutions, and devotion to Kirk Hinrich, whom he still mistakenly believes is the second coming of Steve Nash.

It was so bad in the playoffs last spring that Luol Deng and Ben Gordon -- two men who have thus far refused to sign contract extensions -- openly questioned the Bulls' offense.

A measure of success arrived only when getting away from their traditional plan of letting Hinrich dribble out the shot clock before passing to someone forced to throw up a prayer at the buzzer.

The Bulls played their best when Hinrich was out of the game with foul trouble, allowing for better ball movement, especially earlier in the clock, and the Bulls showed some life on offense at times against Miami and Detroit.

As a bonus, for the first time in his tenure here, Skiles even tried posting Deng, taking advantage of good matchups and causing near heart failure among some forced to watch a putrid offense during recent playoff series.

It was possible that we might have even seen some players smiling and having fun, which was frowned upon during the Skiles era.

Look, we're all for old school here, but it doesn't matter how much money players make if they're miserable and don't enjoy playing the game.

Under those totalitarian tactics, like it or not, you're not going to get the players' best.

Skiles also was consistently outcoached, especially in the postseason tourney, where his teams have lost five of seven series.

He was so stubborn against Detroit last spring that by the time he actually made adjustments to the Bulls' offensive and defensive flow, the Bulls were down 3-0 to the Pistons.

Even when he did alter his rotation, changed the pace of the game, added traps, ran more screens and generally confused the Pistons (and people like P.J. Brown, Flip Saunders and Chauncey Billups all credited those moves with getting the Bulls back in the series), Skiles refused to concede anything was different, because taking credit for that would have been admitting he should have taken part in the proceedings sooner.

After going out on a limb for Skiles in June 2005, securing a controversial extension for the coach, Paxson even hinted at his news conference that he didn't always understand Skiles' coaching.

"I sometimes wonder why Ben (Gordon) is taken out of a game,'' Paxson said 30 months ago. "But his job is to coach and he's a great coach, and I'm an easy guy to work for.''

But as we also warned Paxson at the time, "(Paxson) will be in trouble with (Jerry) Reinsdorf when he goes to him in a year or two and asks the owner to eat another contract because the players have tuned out Skiles and are talking mutiny.''

So that's where Paxson is today, still looking for a low-post scorer, an Eastern Conference finals appearance, and now another coach.

The clock ticks on his regime, as it does on some players who've been impatiently waiting for this day to exhale and smile again.

They got what they wanted, a breath of fresh air, a load off their backs, and they must perform in order to stay in the most forgiving sports city on the planet.

They have to show they can win more than a playoff series or some of them will be gone, too.