North: The Bulls have embarrassed themselves
The Bulls made a spectacle of themselves this past week on a national level.
According to John Paxson, vice president of basketball operations, the Bulls should have won a championship because of injuries to other teams in the conference.
Maybe Kyrie Irving was banged up and Kevin Love was out for the Cleveland Cavaliers, but I thought I saw Le-Bron James out there playing at his usual pace. Maybe Pax failed to realize the Bulls had their own nagging injuries to Taj Gibson and Joakim Noah. Plus, Pau Gasol, a key component in the Bulls' run, missed two games against the Cavs.
And we can't forget our 2010-11 MVP Derrick Rose missed almost three full seasons, but there was Pax saying the Bulls didn't get the job done. The front office of Pax, Gar Forman and chairman Jerry Reinsdorf are now readyready to introduce Iowa State's Fred Hoiberg as the new coach.
Hoiberg amassed a 115-56 record at Iowa but failed to advance this year in the NCAA Tournament after losing as a No. 3 seed to the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
He also underwent heart surgery in April, but physically he seems to be doing well.
I don't get the fascination with Iowa State. That's where former Bulls coach Tim Floyd came from, and we all know how that played out.
You have to give Tom Thibodeau credit for staying quiet, even while Forman, Pax and Reinsdorf stood in line to beat him up, and I hope Thibodeau collects every penny of the $9 million he still has coming from the team.
The national pundits are taking shots at the Bulls for the way everything was handled. New York Daily News columnist Frank Isola tweeted out that all Hoiberg had to do was smile at the Bulls' media guys and they would write poems about good old Fred.
Even though I can add that Isola's a homer himself for everything New York, he is pretty right on target. The narrative of the Bulls is that Thibs wasn't a good soldier.
How sad.
Yes, the Bulls did give him the opportunity, but he delivered a 65 percent winning average, and considering his best player was out for almost three seasons, I think that's pretty good. At the end of the day, it didn't matter that the fans loved Thibs because the Bulls didn't.
I thought Reinsdorf's statement about culture and trust within an organization was pretty bogus, considering not that long ago the organization denied there were any issues. How's that for honesty?
Everybody got hurt in this one. The new Bulls coach will have our back, but it will be tough to top Thibodeau's performance, and the team played hard for the guy.
I picked Cleveland over the Bulls before the series started even with the injuries.
What was Paxson thinking? He should know after playing with Michael Jordan that the best player on the court is always the common denominator.
• North's column appears each Tuesday and Friday in the Daily Herald, and his video commentary can be found Monday, Wednesday and Thursday at dailyherald.com. For more, follow him on Twitter @north2north or visit northtonorth.com.