Peter Patton, director of player development, won't be back

[League Circles]

I'm glad to see this. Probably Ron Adams part 2 where you have some underling literally criticizing the organization (Billy, AK, etc?) to the players, which is simply not good whether it's wise insight or not.

[dougthonus]

You are well with in your right not to think these guys don't anything or have no idea what they actually do for the Bulls. Doesn't mean the rest of us have to agree with that.

You can think anything you want, obviously. I'm having a discussion because it seems topical. Are you just upset that I have stated an alternative view?

If I asked you yesterday, how well did we do developing players this year, what grade would you give them?

Our youngish players:

Ayo - cratered
Pat - cratered
Jalen - cratered
Coby - same as previous year
Giddey - progressed significantly as the season went on (improved shooting / foul drawing)
Matas - progressed significantly as the season went on (no prior baseline though and performed overall within reasonable expectations)

Lesser in importance
Philips - no meaningful development
Terry - went from non-NBA player to fringe rotation defensive specialist

Not sure if I'm missing anyone big here in my quick reply.

Seems like a whole lot of love for Patton based on those results.

[League Circles]

Point the finger elsewhere why don't you AK.

We became one of the best 3pt shooting team BECAUSE of Peter Patton. It's one of the positive things from a trainwreck of a season. What a joke.

We we're 12th in %. We did make a lot, but that could just as easily be due to better team passing and different personnel than the shooting coach. Like Doug said, it's just a fact that we have absolutely no way to evaluate him.

[Jcool0]

Point the finger elsewhere why don't you AK.

We became one of the best 3pt shooting team BECAUSE of Peter Patton. It's one of the positive things from a trainwreck of a season. What a joke.

We we're 12th in %. We did make a lot, but that could just as easily be due to better team passing and different personnel than the shooting coach. Like Doug said, it's just a fact that we have absolutely no way to evaluate him.

The reason you say there is no way to evaluate him is just an opinion.

[Jcool0]

You are well with in your right not to think these guys don't anything or have no idea what they actually do for the Bulls. Doesn't mean the rest of us have to agree with that.

You can think anything you want, obviously. I'm having a discussion because it seems topical. Are you just upset that I have stated an alternative view?

If I asked you yesterday, how well did we do developing players this year, what grade would you give them?

Our youngish players:

Ayo - cratered
Pat - cratered
Jalen - cratered
Coby - same as previous year
Giddey - progressed significantly as the season went on (improved shooting / foul drawing)
Matas - progressed significantly as the season went on (no prior baseline though and performed overall within reasonable expectations)

Lesser in importance
Philips - no meaningful development
Terry - went from non-NBA player to fringe rotation defensive specialist

Not sure if I'm missing anyone big here in my quick reply.

Seems like a whole lot of love for Patton based on those results.

Coby finished the year shooting 39% on 7 attempts

Ayo's last 20 games before the injury: 41% on 3.9 attempts

[DASMACKDOWN]

I'm still trying to figure out the point of this. Like what is the premise to move on from Patton? Someone the players liked as well. Everything AK does is cringe.

[dougthonus]

Coby finished the year shooting 39% on 7 attempts

Ayo's last 20 games before the injury: 41% on 3.9 attempts

Coby shot 37% on the year (tiny downtick from last year).
Ayo shot 32.8% on the year (significant downtick from last year).

Not sure why you want to quote small sample sizes.

Either way, if you loved our player development under Patton, fair enough. I'm not stating he was awful, but people have largely been complaining about our player development most of the season, and now seem upset the head of player development is let go. As long as the firing is not a shift away from the importance of player development, but a shift in trying to improve player development, I am good.

Obviously remains to be seen what we will actually do here.

[Indomitable]

What the hell is wrong with AK? Can the Bulls get a new front office please, the wrong people are being let go. FFS.

Always remove those who can replace you.

The Bulls is an organization that likes being comfortable. Patton is competent and did not agree with him.

He decided to crush him before he could become a problem.

[Indomitable]

Coby finished the year shooting 39% on 7 attempts

Ayo's last 20 games before the injury: 41% on 3.9 attempts

Coby shot 37% on the year (tiny downtick from last year).
Ayo shot 32.8% on the year (significant downtick from last year).

Not sure why you want to quote small sample sizes.

Either way, if you loved our player development under Patton, fair enough. I'm not stating he was awful, but people have largely been complaining about our player development most of the season, and now seem upset the head of player development is let go. As long as the firing is not a shift away from the importance of player development, but a shift in trying to improve player development, I am good.

Obviously remains to be seen what we will actually do here.

Ayo also spent most of the sense hurt. He missed a lot of games.

Vuc shot better
Zach shot better
Giddey was better
Dalen even improved

This seems to be another cya move to me.

[MrSparkle]

I find it more absurd that AK used this guy for two summers straight as a justification for standing pat.

Jimmy became great without a team shooting coach. I really think at a certain point, these $100M children need to hold themselves accountable and seek ways to improve.

End of the day, treating paid pros like college students has some real limitations. In the end, I appreciate a balance of the good player/agent relationships, focus on team building and skills development. Riley lays some strict rules on his players’ training habits, but never seems to lose their respect unless the player’s ego is out of this world (maybe justifiably in LeBron’s case, less so in Jimmy’s).

But how about the scouting department? Any firings? Terry, Pat, Ayo, Phillips and Marko are your lot from 4 drafts?

[nomorezorro]

If I asked you yesterday, how well did we do developing players this year, what grade would you give them?

you know peter patton was here for more than one season right

[Jcool0]

Coby finished the year shooting 39% on 7 attempts

Ayo's last 20 games before the injury: 41% on 3.9 attempts

Coby shot 37% on the year (tiny downtick from last year).
Ayo shot 32.8% on the year (significant downtick from last year).

Not sure why you want to quote small sample sizes.

Either way, if you loved our player development under Patton, fair enough. I'm not stating he was awful, but people have largely been complaining about our player development most of the season, and now seem upset the head of player development is let go. As long as the firing is not a shift away from the importance of player development, but a shift in trying to improve player development, I am good.

Obviously remains to be seen what we will actually do here.

Read on Twitter

[dougthonus]

Ayo also spent most of the sense hurt. He missed a lot of games.

Vuc shot better
Zach shot better
Giddey was better
Dalen even improved

This seems to be another cya move to me.

Whom is he CYA'ing from? You think Reinsdorf is "you got to roll someone's head for this!". There was no need for CYA here. He just didn't want Patton for whatever reason. Either he didn't think Patton was good or didn't like the the contradictory voice (like Cowley said). There's no scapegoating or CYA, or else he'd have done it before the press conference and noted the need to change publicly. This was a side note only known to die hard Bulls fans and meant to be done low key and out of the way, not as a CYA move.

As for the above, do you think Vuc and Zach's shots improved because of Patton. That doesn't seem like something people would really think on the surface. Zach returned to career norms. Vuc has been up and down every other year and is 34.

Giddey made real improvements as did Dalen (albeit in limited minutes because he's still a fringe player which isn't Patton's fault).

[dougthonus]

Coby finished the year shooting 39% on 7 attempts

Ayo's last 20 games before the injury: 41% on 3.9 attempts

Coby shot 37% on the year (tiny downtick from last year).
Ayo shot 32.8% on the year (significant downtick from last year).

Not sure why you want to quote small sample sizes.

Either way, if you loved our player development under Patton, fair enough. I'm not stating he was awful, but people have largely been complaining about our player development most of the season, and now seem upset the head of player development is let go. As long as the firing is not a shift away from the importance of player development, but a shift in trying to improve player development, I am good.

Obviously remains to be seen what we will actually do here.

Read on Twitter

He was the director of player development, head of all development, but people are only looking at 3% as the sign of that. I think over Patton's time here, the one player whom has taken a big leap forward is Coby White, whom ascended 2 years ago along with Patton coming on board. The signs of that were all here prior to Patton, and the reality is based on Coby's play you could almost draw a direct line to he is great when Zach is not here, and terrible when Zach was here, but his overall numbers went way up under Patton.

That said, Coby's still a sub 15 PER guy.

No one else is even in the conversation as a developmental "wow that's much better than I thought" bright spot over the last two seasons. Coby probably is, depending what you think about Coby. For me, that's just a "I don't feel strongly about this guy" type of track record. I don't think 2 days ago, if you asked fans "what do you think of the Bulls player development over the past two years" that they'd go "It's been B+/A- material". I think prior to this news, fans would have given us poor marks on player development overall.

[Bulliever2020]

Coby finished the year shooting 39% on 7 attempts

Ayo's last 20 games before the injury: 41% on 3.9 attempts

Coby shot 37% on the year (tiny downtick from last year).
Ayo shot 32.8% on the year (significant downtick from last year).

Not sure why you want to quote small sample sizes.

Either way, if you loved our player development under Patton, fair enough. I'm not stating he was awful, but people have largely been complaining about our player development most of the season, and now seem upset the head of player development is let go. As long as the firing is not a shift away from the importance of player development, but a shift in trying to improve player development, I am good.

Obviously remains to be seen what we will actually do here.

Read on Twitter

Huerter went from 30.2% with the Kings to 37.5% with the Bulls as well. To say there is zero proof of him having a positive impact on the shooting of the Bulls players is beyond ridiculous.

and his reputation around the league speaks for itself.

[jnrjr79]

:rofl:

You know everyone just hates these guys when people get up and arms about them being let go. If people loved AK, they'd be like "hell yeah, we're not settling for these guys, we're looking to improve!". I have no way to judge Patton or Weiman, and probably no one else does here either.

Weinman has been with the Bulls forever, and the Bulls have been absolutely backwards on analytics for almost all of that time. Maybe no one listened to Weinman, maybe Weinman is bad at his job, no way to know, but no one should be praising the Bulls analytics department under him.

Joe's got an anonymous player quote that could be from Talen Horten Tucker or some other nobody for all we know, and the assistant / development coaches are almost always among the most popular, so no surprise Patton was liked. Maybe Patton was great, maybe not. Ayo/Pat cratered with their shooting this year. Giddey/Terry saw some improvements. Coby was about the same. How much impact did Patton have and on who? No way to know.

AK's gotten to the billboard point where it really doesn't matter what he does, everyone will assume the worst.

FWIW, I also think AK sucks, and he may suck for this, I just have a hard time getting too up in arms for these types of moves where you really have nothing to go on.

I’m not so sure about this. If Patton was let go because or poor performance, then I’d agree and say we don’t have enough visibility into his performance to know whether that was a good or bad call. But if the report is accurate that he was let go for being too vocal with opinions that clashed with AK’s, then that’s just bad, absent some sort of outright unprofessional insubordination.

It’s Cowley, so I’m definitely open to the possibility that he’s just spinning a narrative that it’s due to Patton speaking up, so I’m not taking it at face value. But it makes you wonder.

[DASMACKDOWN]

I'm not stating he was awful, but people have largely been complaining about our player development most of the season, and now seem upset the head of player development is let go.

Completely misplaced. I am willing to bet that no one was ever complaining about Peter Patton. AK? Sure. Billy Donovan? Sure. Not Peter Patton.
I would bet he was 0% on the radar for someone to be fired. So, I strongly disagree with that.

You have to take into account, that the only reason we even know his name. is because his name was consistently being dropped by our best players the last 2 years. That impact was clearly felt.

Couple that with reports that several players are upset at the firing makes this much worse.

What AK just did would be like Coby's agent firing Johnny Dribble2much.

But the real crux of the matter is AK is firing the coaching staff while doing nothing to the roster. That is why moves like this create more ire from the fans.

[The Explorer]

Welp, time to stop caring about this team. When you think about it, it's honestly a very dumb decision to invest time, money and emotions into such an incompetent organization.

[League Circles]

Point the finger elsewhere why don't you AK.

We became one of the best 3pt shooting team BECAUSE of Peter Patton. It's one of the positive things from a trainwreck of a season. What a joke.

We we're 12th in %. We did make a lot, but that could just as easily be due to better team passing and different personnel than the shooting coach. Like Doug said, it's just a fact that we have absolutely no way to evaluate him.

The reason you say there is no way to evaluate him is just an opinion.

I mean there can be a million different reasons why players shooting percentages go up or down. I suppose if you actually got to watch Patton in action on a daily basis and had other shooting coaches to compare him to, then you could evaluate him. Otherwise we're just grasping at straws.

[dougthonus]

Completely misplaced. I am willing to bet that no one was ever complaining about Peter Patton. AK? Sure. Billy Donovan? Sure. Not Peter Patton.
I would bet he was 0% on the radar for someone to be fired. So, I strongly disagree with that.

I didn't say people blamed Peter Patton.

I said people complained about player development all year. Peter Patton is in fact the head of player development. If people blamed player development on AK, AK's ability to alter player development is to change the player development staff. AK is not going and developing players himself.

So if you hate this firing, then it stands to reason that you think highly of our player development. If not, then what are we talking about here? You can't hate the player development, pin it on the GM, then yell at the GM for taking the only action he can to fix it.

But the real crux of the matter is AK is firing the coaching staff while doing nothing to the roster. That is why moves like this create more ire from the fans.

AK can literally not change the roster right now. I mean it's not even possible. But I agree, people hate this move because they now hate AK, which is exactly what I said. The actual merits of the move aren't involved or are at least minimally involved. The primary thing is people just hate AK and are made because they want him to fix things. The things he can address now are staff. That's it. So he's addressing staff.

Time will tell if these are good moves or bad moves based on the replacements.