The Wheel Has Turned and the Cycle Continues Anew: The Bulls Have Hired a Bald Asshole

For some reason the Bulls, an already crummy team ravaged by every single player tearing the same knee ligament, decided to fire gormless PTA Dad Fred Hoiberg.  Hoiberg had little going for him as a head coach.  At the same time, he faced bizarre circumstances where he was put in charge of a roiling, conspiracy-prone Three Alphas team that had little time for his pajama party bonding sessions because they were headed by veterans more concerned with invading Silesia.  The next year, they tanked; Hoiberg also had a player just completely and utterly destroy another player's face and the organization decided that the guy crumpled on the floor deserved it.  And then, just when Lauri Markkanen returned from injury and the team could be poised to Space and Pace as prophesied many moons ago from Ames, John Paxson and Gar Forman burst into his rumpus room and fired him out of nowhere because it was time for them to bring in a Bald Asshole.
 
An extremely normal image that comes up when you google Jim Boylen

The Bulls have a pattern for coaches that rotates between ineffective Hair Guys and Bald Assholes.  They brought in Scott Skiles to scream at everyone about playing defense for several seasons until they had to stop players from assassinating him after practice.  His replacement was Vinny Del Negro, a man with a glorious mane and a confused look on his face.  Then they brought in the ur-Bald Asshole in Tom Thibodeau, a bizarre basketball monomaniac who spent all of his time sitting around in the same black track suit watching film and just vibrating with anger that somewhere a basketball player was not boxing out.  Thibodeau, with his manic floor-bellowing, his complete inability to take a single play off even during a grinding 82-game season, and his Sipowicz-but-less-put-together aesthetic, fell into an unending conflagration with the front office that went as far as to involve rumors that coaches turned on fans because they feared their offices were bugged.  It turns out that Derrick Rose's knee ligaments were the only things holding the fractious Bulls together.

Jim Boylen is a classic Bald Asshole. He wants to talk about Defense. And Fundamentals. They're going to do Suicides.  And he's going to scream at everyone until his throbbing skull glows red as a heating lamp over a 7-11 hotdog roller.  He has been the Bulls coach for less than a week and has nearly incited a mutiny.



It's not Jim Boylen's fault that he looks like a crooked prosecutor who "strongly denies" involvement in a boat license entrapment scheme, but he made no bones about his public image and immediately decided it would be the hardass vice principal from Back to the Future.

On Saturday, the hapless Bulls were utterly dismantled by the Celtics in their worst loss in the history of the team.  Boylen reacted with hockey substitutions and pulling starters presumably so he could scream at them in practice the next day.  The Bulls then started a group text about whether or not to even show up to practice because they did not want a pointy-headed doofus setting up dozens of desks so he could angrily clear everything off of them while yelling that they shouldn't have done the worst loss in the history of the team.  Now everyone is saying what they need to in order to prevent Boylen from looking like an even angrier, redder asshole than he already did.

What's next for Boylen? Will he stop a game in the middle and just leave?  Move into Jabari Parker's house so he can tell him to pick his knees up for godssake pick your GODDAMN KNEES UP?  Will he burst forth from Zach Lavine's chest while angrily tooting a whistle?

Is there a worse archetype in sports than the Bald Asshole coach, the guy who decides he's not gonna have any LOLLYGAGGING around here? Is there anything more absurd in the NBA, where multi-millionaire adults are really going to listen to some glistening sausage casing who looks like the alderman's brother-in-law who is somehow on the payroll?  And, this is a completely unrelated subject, but what are the odds that the Bulls have interim coaches named Jim Boylan and Jim Boylen and they are two different guys because honestly before Coach Tugboat came in there and started throwing things that simple fact broke my brain for several hours?

The answer to all of those questions is John Paxson.  Paxson loves this shit.  A guy who literally choked a coach and who has spent the past two decades in Chicago playing dumb macho headgames absolutely loves it when he opens the door and some guy who is already putting fist dents into a filing cabinet has prepared a rhyme about how every player is dogshit DOGSHIT.  Perhaps we can find a the biggest, baldest asshole humanly possible, just a smooth-headed maniac radiating spittle and sprouting auxiliary whistles, just a nine-foot colossus who is so angry that he must be wheeled around in a plexiglass box to prevent him from causing millions of dollars of property damage at all times to come in and yell at John Paxson two inches from his face while blasting on a whistle and punching the walls of his traveling prison-box and telling Paxson to stop running this basketball team like a goddamned opera.