Scottie Pippen has already found himself in some hot water with Bulls fans over the last week when he said that LeBron James may be a better overall player than Michael Jordan was. Which on the Chicago Bulls Scale of Blasphemy ranked somewhere around 132 on a scale of 1-10 considering that LeBron James had just done to the Bulls to knock them out of the playoffs.
So you might think that Scottie would step back a bit and let things cool down before opening up about his feeling again. You would be wrong, however, as Scottie has fired some more shots at the Bulls this week, though he did make sure to focus on the current team this time.
"They made Derrick work too hard for his offense. That's why he ended up shooting 9-for-29 [in Game 5 on Thursday night and 42-for-120 for the series]," Scottie Pippen told ESPNChicago.
"They hound [Rose] off the pick with two guys who are 6-9, so he has to make a pass. And now you give it to a guy who can't make a play. Derrick passes to Joakim, Joakim passes it back and now the shot clock is against him.
"How can you be efficient when you don't even have to make the defense move or shift, because they're not rotating to Joakim, they're not doubling Boozer. You put a little traffic around Boozer, and he couldn't hold on to the ball anyway. I don't know if his toe was the cause of [some of his poor play], but it doesn't explain bad hands. He didn't perform."
And just in case Scottie was worried he was alienating anybody with these comments, he made sure to criticize Tom Thibodeau as well.
"Kurt's number should have been called many, many games ago," Pippen said. "We got to this point with Kurt Thomas, not without him. He's a hard-nosed guy, he gives hard fouls, he carried minutes and was a starter during the season. And then in the postseason, we felt we could win with guys who could get us there but not guys who actually did get us there. It kind of downplayed what the bench did for us all season.
"[Thomas] could have been the guy to come in and knock shots down. To me, you weren't utilizing what he can do for you. Like [Udonis] Haslem, when [Dwyane] Wade wasn't making shots in Game 3, they kept running pick-and-roll plays [for Haslem] because he was making plays. We never went back to Kurt after he made plays."
Now keep in mind that Pippen works for the Bulls as an ambassador, much like the Blackhawks do with Denis Savard, Bobby Hull and Tony Esposito. He's not just a former player hanging out at the United Center taking shots at the team. He's a Bulls employee, and I'm not sure that saying these things publicly is the best way for him to go about his business.
That being said, I don't think he's in any danger of being fired. He's Scottie Pippen.
Also in his favor? He's absolutely correct in everything he said. Scottie wasn't saying anything that plenty of Bulls fans haven't been saying for a while now. Hell, I'd been crying for Kurt Thomas to get some playing time since the Atlanta series. So unlike the LeBron/Jordan comparisons -- comparisons that really weren't as far off as most of us want to believe -- there's nothing Pip said that we can be upset with him here. We can just be upset with the Bulls.
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