NBA teams
Jon Greenberg, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

Coaching scared suits Thibodeau

NBA, Chicago Bulls

CHICAGO -- The long slog that is the NBA regular season tips off at the end of this month, and the talk around league circles is about shortening games or just simply lopping a dozen off the schedule.

As they wait out two-hour practices, beat writers in press rooms compare hotel reservations and plane rides as they navigate the hobo travel schedule.

To some, the NBA regular season is a necessary formality, something to be endured.

Meanwhile, for Chicago Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau, it's a logic puzzle and a leadership test, a marathon that's occasionally a sprint.

Thibodeau, the ultimate one-game-at-a-time coach, already has the season plotted out to to the day.

To paraphrase an old radio serial: Who knows when the Bulls will have a day off in mid-February? The Thibodeau knows!

But it's the unknowns that drive him crazy. That's why he seems feistier than normal as the veteran-laden Bulls ready themselves for what augurs for a long season.

Why is Thibs' dander up already? After years of armchair psychoanalysis about Thibodeau, I've come to a simple hypothesis: He coaches scared.

Yes, that's true of all coaches, and all great athletes. But Thibodeau lives on a real high wire of emotion and expectations. He is frightened about skipped steps, ropes with no one attached, empty circles.

Thibs doesn't do chaos. When the schedule comes out in mid-August, he maps out the rest days for the season. He created his own player efficiency rankings as an assistant coach in the 1990s. He'll do anything to minimize risk and maximize victories.

So, if you think the preseason, and the first couple months of the regular season, are something to endure, you are not in Thibs' circle. You might as well be speaking a different language.

Don't you get? It's all connected, man.

Thibodeau is a fantastic coach because he doesn't think like you, me or Vinny Del Negro.

He's obsessive and organized, and while it's easy to scoff as he whines about player readiness in the second week of October, it's important to recognize where he's coming from and where he wants to go.

"I don't want them to fool themselves," Thibodeau said recently. "To me, the big thing is understanding what goes into winning and how you practice and prepare and the work that's necessary to put into it to get yourself in great shape. You need to prepare yourself to play four games in five days, to play a long season, to have an edge, to understand what goes into winning, why you win and why you lose, to build the proper habits. That's something you do every day."

And the team has to be receptive to his coaching, with staying within themselves. That's why you hear some dissonance between their words and his words.

"We have to be patient," Joakim Noah said after practice Wednesday. "I know we have a lot of work to do. This isn't the finished product right here. It's preseason. We have our mindset, we just have to keep with it."

The Bulls need a guy like Thibodeau, whose mind and mouth are going 100 mph, just as they need players who know how to pace themselves, a medical staff willing to stand up for the players' short-term and long-term health and a front office to oversee it all.

There is an inherent tension in a team. The challenge is making sure everyone works toward the same goal without killing each other.

Now, Thibodeau's always on edge, but it seems as though he's teetering over it this preseason, as he challenges the notion that his best players, both coming off knee injuries, don't need to be pushed before, say, Thanksgiving.

As one Bulls observer noted, it's rare for Thibodeau to publicly single out players in a negative, or at least critical way, as he has done with Derrick Rose and Noah recently.

Perhaps he didn't do that as much in years past, because he would've been constantly going after defensively challenged Carlos Boozer, who took enough grief from fans and reporters.

But Boozer is in Los Angeles, Pau Gasol is here, LeBron James is in Cleveland and this Bulls team is finally poised to make a deep playoff run with a healthy Rose, Gasol and assorted new players.

I asked Noah if Thibodeau is more intense this season.

"Naw, he's the same," he said.

But as Thibodeau would say, every situation is different. So I asked Thibodeau, after a 2-hour, 15-minute practice Wednesday, if he's being extra hard on this team early because his expectations are higher.

It's a long answer, but it's worth reading and parsing for meaning, especially when it pertains to "the truth."

"You're trying to prep for what you're going to face," he said. "The challenge for us is we've got two guys who are rookies that we've got to get up to speed. We have Pau, who's a new guy, there's a lot going on. There's Derrick, who's coming back after a long layoff. So there's a lot of work to be done.

"It's going to be a great challenge for us. Your job is telling your team the truth, as you see it every day. And often times, you're asking them to do all the things they don't necessarily want to do to achieve the thing they ultimately want to achieve. So you have to be honest with them and tell them where you think they are.

"You're looking at what's coming and you ask yourself, are we going to be ready for this? Ultimately, you have to play the games and every time you play a game, it reveals where you are. The challenge right now, and often times when you have an older team or an experienced team, the urgency sometimes isn't there, so you have to get it there. A big part of your job is having your team ready to go. The thing about the results, I'm more concerned with what we're doing to prepare to win.

"To me, that's the big thing. I know ultimately that's the most important thing. If you're doing the right things, the results will take care of themselves. You're going to be good. If you don't do those things and you take a shortcut, you're ultimately not going to play up to your capabilities, I know that. We have to get after it every day."

That's Thibodeau in 300 words or less.

The question is can Thibodeau get the most out of his team every night and plan for the good health of the team? The NBA season is unforgiving enough, then you have Rose's recent injury history, Noah's injury history, Gasol is getting older. Thibodeau is always careful to point out that it's the behind-the-scenes stuff that maintains players' health, not the minutes on the floor.

But that doesn't keep people from counting minutes and keeping a critical eye on how he uses players. Is it fair? Probably.

The reason the Bulls haven't advanced in the playoffs since Thibodeau's first year is due solely to Rose's injuries, which aren't from overuse.

Rose has missed three straight postseasons with two knee injuries. As important as Thibodeau is to the team's identity, when it comes to the playoffs, when every coaching staff has time to scout and prepare, it comes down to the guys on the floor.

But we've seen Thibodeau's monomaniacal side come out in the playoffs as we watched guys limp around on impossibly injured joints and ligaments, ones that can't be toughed out. We saw the Bulls completely bumble the Luol Deng situation two years ago in the postseason and ride Kirk Hinrich until he was almost sent to the glue factory. Noah was playing on a bad knee that required surgery this summer.

The impossible question before us is: Can the Bulls play up to Thibodeau's high standards and be as whole as possible in April, May and June? That can't be answered in October.

The road to June is a winding one, full of unforeseen obstacles, twisted ankles, sore knees and home-and-road back-to-backs.

It's a long journey, but the Bulls hope to end it in good fortune and good health.

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