It's a lot of things: 1. Skiles lost the team, and no one has gotten them to respond like he did. 2. Team started playing for themselves more then as a team 3. The east has gotten much better 4. They got worse defensively (one example, Wallace to Gooden....as bad as Wallace was, Gooden is an embarassingly bad interior defender) The first 3 are all coaching. Clearly NBA guys are coachable (as illustrated by many other teams), but the Bulls have hired a string of sub-par guys post-Jackson. It's also pretty clear that teams don't win in the NBA without a superstar, and the Bulls haven't had one in a decade I thought Skiles was an alright coach, especially for a young team that was still coachable. He was never the coach to take us to the next level, and I think Pax sensed that and canned him when the time was right. However, knowing the team the Bulls have (athletically speaking) and seeing how the Knicks have done so far this season, the Bulls would be 100 times better this season if they had landed D'Antoni. I still can't believe we didn't get him.