I love how people fall over themselves to call Thibs a great coach when his teams can't even beat the Bucks and Bobcats. He overplay's his players and he's the sole reason D Rose is out.

It's a amazing how a guy can be so highly thought of by winning alot in sports most meaningless regular season

Thibodeau is a really good coach, but I agree that he does not help Rose's health. That being said, its not his fault that Rose's style of play results in more injuries than a shooting guard.

I think Rose is an incredible player, but needs another high skilled player that can complement him in the paint on offense. That would give Rose options to dish off and not get crushed every time he cuts to the basket. Rose could also change his game up a bit. That would reduce some of the pressure on Thibodeau to run plays that get Rose injured.

Outside of that, tell me a coach that has done better than Thibodeau in the past five to ten seasons with a team lacking talent like the Bulls have this year.

Of course Walt would get a mult 5 years after it was cool.

Thibodeau did win it with Boston, so he has that over Skiles. I agree though, I don't think he is a great coach. He is just better than a lot of the crap currently coaching in the NBA. I mean, christ, Eric Spolestra just won a championship.

ass is tant coach duh
who is Thibs asst Hoffy ????? good answer

Adrian Griffin.

The difference is I freely admit I don't know shit about basketball.

So now it's up to D'bag

Ed Pinckney.

I liked Kurt Thomas. I think his big body underneath might have helped against Miami. In close games an extra rebound or defensive stop could make a difference.

I love how people fall over themselves to call Thibs a great coach when his teams can't even beat the Bucks and Bobcats. He overplay's his players and he's the sole reason D Rose is out.

It's a amazing how a guy can be so highly thought of by winning alot in sports most meaningless regular season

They couldnt score a basket down the stretch. Thomas wouldnt have helped. They needed a Vinnie Johnson. They needed a John Paxon. They needed someone to end runs of points by great players that will always go on a run. They couldnt finish games not because if defense, but because they couldnt match basket for basket in crunch time.

Defense is a good thing and during the season is huge for seeding but you have to score down the stretch against championship quality teams with hall of fame players. Great players are going to score and they are going to get calls. Good team defense or not.

The Bulls have been the league's best defensive team since Chicago hired Tom Thibodeau before the 2011 season. But they've achieved that in a sort of counterintuitive way. The NBA is a pick-and-roll league, and you can feel Thibodeau's stress building when he starts talking about facing "50 or 60 or 70" pick-and-rolls in the same game, "and with so many variations." The pick-and-roll is a two-man play, generally involving a ball handler and a big guy setting a screen for that ball handler. Chicago has built its defense around an interesting principle: It wants one of the two guys directly involved in the pick-and-roll shooting at the end of it.

There are other rules and sub-rules, but Chicago under Thibodeau has consistently ranked at or near the top of the league in the percentage of opponent possessions that end with one of those two guys shooting, per Synergy Sports. Other teams, including the Heat, try to force one of the other three guys on the floor to beat them, but Thibodeau wants to make those other three guys borderline useless. That philosophy is based on a rather bold belief: The Bulls think their two defenders, with just a little bit of help, can beat your two offensive players and coax the exact kind of low-efficiency shot you don't want to take. "You're trying to get perfection out of it," Thibodeau tells Grantland, "trying to get as close to perfect as a team could possibly be."

Scary news for the rest of the league: The Bulls are pretty close. Watch film of Chicago's defense until your eyes bleed/your wife kills you — and I did — and the precision, so close to perfection, is overwhelming and almost beautiful. The Bulls, more than any team I've ever seen — including the Duncan-era Spurs and the 2007-08 Celtics, for whom Thibodeau was the defensive coordinator — just do not make mistakes. Even Carlos Boozer, justifiably maligned for his flat-flooted defense, at least understands Chicago's scheme and places those flat feet in the right place at the right time. He doesn't misread plays, botch rotations, stand up lazy and straight, or gamble irresponsibly, and is thus not actively harmful in the way someone like Monta Ellis or DeMarcus Cousins can be to a team's defense.

Chicago is up to third in points allowed per possession despite dealing with a new wave of injuries and working in a bunch of new parts, including a totally revamped bench. They're struggling on offense and have some rotation questions to answer, but that defense, so damn good, is the reason the Bulls stand 10 games over .500, a sleeping giant of a title contender awaiting the return of the one player who can make its ho-hum offense go.

The Bulls, when facing a high pick-and-roll, go into a powerful scripted routine:

• Their point guard, Kirk Hinrich or Nate Robinson, will jump in front of the pick and try to force the ball handler away from the screen and to the left side. I don't have access to the fancy statistical databases that could verify this, but I'd bet heavy that Chicago is one of the two or three best teams at getting opposing point guards to go left. Hinrich might be a non-entity on offense and one of the most boring players in the league, but he is willing to engage in physical battles to get between a point guard and a pick. "He has always been very, very difficult to screen," says Gar Forman, the Bulls' GM.

A bonus: By positioning himself between the opposing ball handler and screener at the start of a play, Hinrich stays in or near the passing lane between them as the play develops and each moves toward the rim. Chicago opponents have trouble hitting roll men near the basket because any such pass has to go through a thicket of arms; a startlingly high percentage of shots roll men actually attempt against the Bulls are long 2-point jumpers — the worst shot in the game.

• The big man guarding the screener (Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson, Boozer) will drop down around the left elbow, hoping to corral the ball handler there. The goal is to force the guard to pick up his dribble so that the big-man defender can return to the big man rolling to the rim.

• The three Chicago defenders guarding the shooters around the perimeter generally stay close to home rather than crashing hard into the paint. This is where the Bulls differentiate themselves from lots of other teams, including Miami and Boston. If a pick-and-roll goes left, it is generally the job of the defender guarding a shooter on the right side of the floor — the weak side at that point — to dash into the paint and bump the big man rolling toward the hoop. This is why you often see such defenders stationed with one foot in the paint, far from their actual "man," before a pick-and-roll even starts.