Wednesday November 25, 2009
As this is my project, I get to say which team goes first. So this week, we will begin with the Chicago Bulls as that is my favorite team and improvisation’s Mecca is Chicago.
So, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 30 odd years, you’re probably aware there is a human being by the name of Michael Jordan. Yeah, he was pretty good at basketball.
When he retired, for the 2nd time in 1998, the Bulls began to suck. Boy, did they suck. Watching the Bulls whimper their way through a 13-37 strike shortened season only to have it be followed up the next season with a horrible 17-65 record was brutal. For you improvisers reading this, it was like watching a student show with 2 teams going back to back and the teacher forgot to show up to call the lights to end the show so the bad thing happening in front of you just goes on and on and on. In fact, now that I think of it, I’d rather watch that 17-65 regular season. It would go by faster.
But just like in improv, professional basketball is always benefitted by the infusion of new blood; wide-eyed, young performers willing to jump into the mix. Professional basketball has one leg up on improv in this regard as they have the NBA Draft. You suck long enough in the NBA and you at least have the opportunity to stock up on a lot of talent; which brings us to the current incarnation of my beloved Bulls.
The Bulls are what is known in the Association as an “up and coming team”. During those lean years, the Bulls front office made a habit of using most of their top-of-the-order draft picks on either extremely young, high-potential athletic projects or the best players from proven winning college programs.
There is a lot of talk about “the culture of losing/winning” in the professional ranks. The idea was that if you brought in guys who were used to winning and doing the type of work it took to win at the college level than that would rub off on the guys who had all the natural ability in the world but maybe not as much experience.
Yeah, that didn’t work out so well for the Bulls. Not at first.
After some terrible draft picks that didn’t work out (Eddy Curry, eating champion of the NBA, traded away to the Knicks), were hampered by injury (Jay Williams), were given up on by the front office (Tyson Chandler, traded away to the New Orleans Hornets, now sucking it up for the Charlotte Bobcats so maybe not so bad) or were just too insane (Ron Artest!) or expensive (Ben Gordon) to keep past their rookie contracts, the Bulls find themselves in 2009 with a nice nucleus of young, semi-mature, very talented players.
But where the Bulls really started to be taken seriously was when they won the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery when they only had a 1.7% chance of winning the lottery. With the #1 Overall Pick they eagerly chose college basketball freshman phenomenon and Chicago-birthed, point guard Derrick Rose.
(Hi! I'm the future of your franchise. HOLY SHIT, Look at the size of my watch!)
The day of the NBA draft is forever linked in my mind to improv because as the exact moment that Derrick Rose was being picked #1 overall in New York City and I was on stage with Neil Garguilo at the Providence Improv Festival, a drunk driver plowed through the glass front wall of iOWest in Hollywood, CA. Fortunately, none of the above mentioned people were killed.
(There is not a emoticon sad enough to show how I felt when I first saw this picture.)
Last year, Derrick Rose ran away with the Rookie of The Year Award. The Bulls made the playoffs and were in an instant classic of a first round series with the defending champion Boston Celtics. The series went the full seven allotted games and featured a half dozen overtime periods.
Game 1, I was in Phoenix for the 7th Annual Phoenix Improv Festival and watching an intense playoff basketball game at 9am in a hotel room in a strange city when you are a rabid fan that yells encouragement at the television is a great way to get dirty looks from your neighbors the rest of the weekend. They thought I was being murdered for awhile and then after some time probably wished I was being murdered.
So now what? The Bulls have gotten a little taste of success and now what’s the next step?
It reminds me of that improv team that forms out of a class or is put together by the theater as a “developmental team”. The performers may have been on other teams and/or had some individual success.
They go through some ups and downs. Different members come and go. They struggle to find a coach that suits their style or temperament. Maybe they’ve had some mild success; some decent shows and got some laughs. Perhaps they went on a little extended Cagematch run. They’ve got a nice group of like-minded, committed people who interact well on and off the stage. They’re not quite ready for a prime slot on the theater’s main stage but they ain’t exactly chopped liver either, you know?
This is where there is simply no other answer than continuing to grow and build on that momentum you’ve gained as a team. Not a popular answer but the right one nonetheless. Derrick Rose is far and away the best player on the Bulls but he’s only a few games into his second year. He can’t be expected to run the offense, score a bunch of points and be a leader in the locker room all the while working on his own individual development.
Similarly, a naturally gifted improviser who doesn’t have a lot of stage experience can’t be expected to direct the flow of the show, drop all of the funniest one-liners and do all the booking/marketing for a team when he still isn’t sure exactly what kind of player he is yet.
At the same time, the rest of the Bulls young roster is worrying about the same things that the other improvisers on this example team are worrying about: How much playing time am I getting? Why am I not performing as well as I wanted to? Why doesn’t the coach spend as much time with me as he does with those other guys? Why does that guy get all the accolades? Am I letting the team down? I’m used to being the funniest guy in my college short form group and now that I’m at the next level trying to pursue this larger team concept my normal effort isn’t good enough anymore. What’s up with that?
This is where having an experienced but nurturing coach would be invaluable. The coach of the Bulls, Vinny Del Negro, is neither of these things.
Del Negro, a former journeyman player in the Association, until last year had never been a head coach at any level of basketball. Not high school, nor AAU, nor college, nor overseas and certainly never in the NBA. Hell, he’s never even been an assistant coach at any level. His previous job before accepting the head coaching duties for the Chicago Bulls was a VP role in the front office of the Phoenix Suns. Who had an opportunity to interview and hire him to run their team when they had a coaching vacancy and they declined. I’m just saying.
I could go on all day on why it is a terrible, terrible idea to put together a group of young, talented, inexperienced (yet used to a culture of winning) players and then putting a guy who doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing in charge. You can see the logic in that right? Would it make more sense if I told you that Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf is notoriously cheap? Is that better?
It’s congruent with a young improv team not going after the very best coach they can get because either
a) they can’t/won’t pay them their rate or
b) they are too afraid to ask them for fear of them saying no or
c) they’ve had this coach thrust upon them by management.
Young improv teams: Please don’t be your own Jerry Reinsdorf. Please don’t retard your own growth during a few years of your prime by “settling” for a coach that you can get for pennies instead of stepping up and putting your money where your mouth is to try and get the absolute best coach you can so that you can become the absolute best team that you can be. To do so otherwise is madness.
I once was on a team where the coach we approached refused to coach us unless we agreed to his terms: rehearsal for 2 hours at $50 bucks a pop, twice a week and we had to make a 2 year commitment.
We discussed it at a “come to Jesus” meeting at my house and decided that he was the guy we wanted, he was a legend in the scene and we would be the better for it. Best 2 years of my improv development. It made all the difference. Not only am I way better as an improviser than I have any right to be at this moment but I’ve also been humbled by that knowledge; i.e. I haven’t really accomplished anything yet. Unless the team succeeds, how good or bad I am really has no relevance.
Now, I realize that all coaches have to come from somewhere. There will always have to be a first time for a coach. I get that. I really do. But what we’re talking about here is a team that is already further along in their development as a team and individual players than their coach is as a coach. That’s not a recipe for success.
These players are sure of their abilities but they are unsure of their footing. They need a coach who’s been through what they’ve been through BUT with the added benefit of having the necessary gravitas as a coach, as a leader, so that the players will buy into what he’s selling, you know?
If I’m a young talented improviser, how am I going to listen to a coach who’s barely competent or trips over himself or contradicts himself at times? All you need is ONE person on the team to think that and it will be impossible for the group to move forward as a unit. If everyone is not on board, if the coach doesn’t have the full authority to coach the team, with backing from the management/theater and the full respect of his players, than how can the team reach its ultimate goals? You’ll also notice I said “respect” and not “love”. The latter is nice to have but the former is absolutely crucial.
The Bulls already had a few blow-ups in Vinny’s rookie year (which was also Rose’s rookie year). When he reprimanded and fined a few of the players for a minor team rule about eating in the locker room, they blew up at him. This is akin to getting a minor note from an improv coach and the player snapping back “well, this is how I do it.”
When that first season under Del Negro began with a couple of bad showings, players openly questioned, in the media, the game plan. This is akin, in improv, to sitting in the bar after the show and having the players loudly discuss with their friends how the show would have been so much funnier if the coach hadn’t made them do all that “slow, organic bullshit”.
See what I’m getting at here? Winning this season may put some mighty fine deodorant on that problem for now but I guarantee you it will rear its ugly head again soon and eventually Del Negro will be fired. Then the Bulls will (hopefully) bring in the kind of coach that should have been there all along. So what was the point of those wasted years?
I love what the young players on the Chicago Bulls have been able to achieve up to this point. Like an up and coming improv team, I look forward to watching them develop and will accept the bumps and bruises along the way as a necessary evil to ultimately seeing them achieve their ultimate goals. But until they get an experienced hand to guide them to that goal, I’m afraid what I’m really watching are a lot of guys treading water.
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