Vinny Del Negro has to go. That is what Doug is yelling these days. Del Negro is gone a the end of the year. Doug thinks the Bulls should just fire Del Negro right now since they have three legit NBA head coaches sitting on the bench in Bob Ociepka, Bernie Bickerstaff, and Del Harris.

The players have completely tuned out Vinny. During the summer, Vinny made a bunch of promises to the players on how he was going to run the team that he failed to keep.

Vinny is a players coach who the players don’t like.

Vinny was just being spiteful when he fined the guys for eating in the locker room. The team provides food to its players in the locker room. This was a team rule, but no one has followed it in the past. (Apparently not even the Bulls staff, who provides the players with food).

So far this season, Vinny has not been leaning on his assistant coaches. The assistants have just been working on player development.

If there is one thing to take away from this is podcast is that Doug thinks that Vinny Del Negro has to be fired, and has to be fired soon. I completely agree.

You can listen to the entire episode at bullsbeat.com

Here’s something interesting—Coach Vinny Del Negro has a new “grading system” for effort, which he wrote up on the board before tonight’s game. Players were each given a number grade for how much effort they put into the last game against Cleveland, and that, according to Del Negro, is to help bring attention to what certain guys can work on, to make them aware of what he expects from them. Personally, I’d just have a conversation with a guy if he wasn’t giving 100%, but I’m also not being paid to head coach an NBA team.

I really hope this wasn’t one of the fresh ideas that sold Vinny on Paxson. This is what happens when you hire someone who has never coached at any level as the coach of a NBA team. How exactly did Vinny determine the effort the players put out? Does he have a formula to determine it? How does one determine effort?

To put it simply, someone cannot determine the effort that someone is exerting. A player could be putting forth their full effort, but might have some muscle strain, which is hindering his performance, making it look like he is not giving full effort. To quantify something that is so uncertain is beyond idiotic.

While the Bulls are unlikely to fire Vinny during the season, it is hard to see the Bulls retaining Vinny past this season. He’s just been too bad to warrant it. He’s been worse than Jim Boylan.

Both teams came out showing their ineptitude, showing an inability to score at the beginning of the game. It took 4:15 into the game before Ben Gordon finally scored the first points in the game.

The Timberwolves didn’t win because they were particularly good tonight. They were just less bad than the Bulls.

It doesn’t look to get any for the Bulls either. Looking around the league at what the other interim coaches around the league are doing, the Bulls seem content to let Vinny finish out the year before going in a different direction. While an interim coach might not help drastically improve the Bulls, what Vinny is doing to the team has to stop. He is not properly developing Derrick Rose and is probably souring Ben Gordon on the Bulls, which might lead to Ben ditching the Bulls for greener pastures, even if the Bulls are competitive money wise.

Tonight, Derrick Rose started bad, but had a good second half. Rose finished with 22 points and 5 assists.

Ben Gordon had a bad shooting night, finishing 7-21. Those bad shooting nights will happen, so this is nothing to get worried about, especially since Gordon finished with 17 points and 6 assists.

Tyrus Thomas had a really nice game tonight. He finished with 15 points, 8 rebounds, 4 assists, and 8 blocks. It was really nice seeing Thomas being active on help defense. Unfortunately the Bulls other bigs man defense was horrendous.

Al Jefferson finished with 18 points and 14 rebounds and Kevin Love had 18 points and 12 rebounds. They weren’t completely killing the Bulls front court, but took advantage of it in a very methodical manner.

Ryan Gomes scored 19 points hitting clutch shot after clutch shot late in the fourth.

Derrick Rose struggled guarding anyone on defense. The Timberwolves backcourt had good games as well. Randy Foye scored 21 points and Sebastian Telfair added 18 points.

Aaron Gray had 10 points and 9 rebounds.

With the loss, the Bulls fall to 14-20. It will be interesting to see what it will take to get Vinny fired during the season. Dropping the rest of this home stand, with the Bulls three next games against Sacramento, Washington, and Oklahoma City might just do the trick.

For the second straight game, Vinny Del Negro quit. This is the third time this season where Vinny clearly quit on a game, the man is simply a quitter. The Bulls were down 15 with almost an entire quarter left in the game, yet Vinny never brought Rose and Gordon back in the fourth, allowing Cleveland to rebuild their lead.

There is not much to analyze about the Bulls humiliating losses these days. The Bulls are simply playing glorified Boylan-ball. It is only glorified, because Vinny is playing Ben Gordon more than Boylan did and because the Bulls now have Derrick Rose. The Bulls have no noticeable offensive sets and the team doesn’t even pretend to try on the defensive end of the court. Someone should really teach Tyrus Thomas and Joakim Noah about the concept of help defense, because both seem to think that you aren’t allowed to help out when an opposing guard dribbles to the basket.

It is clear what the Bulls have to do, replace Vinny Del Negro. We gave him a try. Perhaps his ideas really were great, but that doesn’t chance the fact that he had no coaching experience, and obviously could not implement anything. And on the small chance that the players are actually running his offensive and defensive sets, then Vinny is a terrible basketball mind. Regardless, the result has been horrific, and Vinny has earned his dismissal.

Derrick Rose finished tonights game with only 3 points and 2 assists. Rose simply didn’t care when he was in the game. He accepted defeat. This is unacceptable. Our head coach has made this team so bad, that our never give up point guard is accepting defeat. The coach needs to go.

Ben Gordon is the lone bright spot for the Bulls tonight, finishing with 22 points, 4 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 steal. He is simply a great scorer, and can score in the face of adversity. Gordon showed a certain look of disgust on his face often tonight. That is the look of other players not passing him the ball when he is sitting there wide open waving his arms yelling for the ball. On one of these plays Thomas dribbled the ball down the court ignoring Gordon on three separate occasions. Sefolosha and Noah also went in against heavy defensive coverage either to be stripped or put up a bad shot. Apparently no one taught our players that you can pass out of the paint to the perimeter in a drive and kick or post up. The coach needs to go.

Our big men again did not produce offensively or defensively. They were easily scored on by the Cleveland bigs and did not offer any resistance to the penetration by Cleveland’s guards. Anderson Varejao had 26 points, Ben Wallace 13, and J.J. Hickson had 13 points. A bunch of Cleveland players had their season highs tonight. The Bulls big men have no idea how to defend either big men or penetrating perimeter players. The coach needs to go.

Lebron James had a triple double for Cleveland, finishing with 16 points, 10 rebounds, and 11 assists. He easily picked apart the Bulls.

Lindsey Hunter added in 13 points for the Bulls and Andres Nocioni had 11 points.

Delonte West gave the Cavs 14 points, Sasha Pavlovic added in 13, and Mo Williams had 11.

Cedric Simmons had 9 points and 4 rebounds. He has done something our other bigs haven’t been able to do, and that is catch and dunk the ball.

Zydranus Ilgauskus did not play tonight.

With the loss, the Bulls fall to 14-19 on the season.

Every once in a while you run across a story that makes your jaw drop. This is one of those.

There’s a story in the Chicago media today about head coach Vinny Del Negro fining three players for eating in the locker room before a recent home game. HOOPSWORLD has learned that the number of players fined was actually five, but whether it was five or three, this story keeps getting wierder.

We’re talking about a team that provides food (at least a fruit tray) to the visitor’s locker room before each game and makes food available to their own players as well. It’s also a team that has never had an issue with players eating before a game, even at their lockers. Ben Gordon has often taken ribbing for his habit of making - not just eating, but actually whipping out condiments, constructing, and eating - peanut butter sandwiches in his locker before games.

So all of a sudden Del Negro decides to not only go off on a group of players, but also fine them for eating in the locker room before a game. Fines were less than a thousand dollars each, but still it’s a strange way to make a point.

It seems to be par for the course for Vinny Del Negro, however, who is going to great lengths to try and establish his authority in the locker room. Given that he’s failed to do it in any traditional way, he beginning to do it in ways that make him seem small and petty.

In case you’re wondering why it’s a bad idea to hand an inexperienced coach the head chair for an NBA franchise, you’re starting to see it in Chicago. Del Negro got the job despite his complete lack of experience coaching at any level, and the Bulls are now bearing the brunt of the consequences for that decision.

This is a team that fired Scott Skiles at about this time last season because his shrill, power-hungry ways were alienating players. Now it seems they replaced him with someone equally as shrill. It would be almost impossible for the Bulls to fire him this season without becoming even more of a laughing stock in NBA circles, but don’t be surprised if he’s one of the first ones picked off next season.

Things are going to get really ugly in Chicago, and that’s not a good situation for a team with so many young players seeking identities and veterans who will be walking away as free agents this summer.

When news first came out about Vinny fining Tyrus Thomas, Larry Hughes, and Joakim Noah for eating in the locker room, it all seemed really strange to me. I was thinking in the back of my mind, what about Ben Gordon’s pregame PB&J’s? I just figured that since Gordon wasn’t listed in the players mentioned, he was doing his eating somewhere else. Turns out my original inclination was right, and that Gordon wasn’t doing his eating elsewhere. What type of long standing team rule could there have possibly been? Remember, this is the team that wouldn’t let Ben Wallace go onto the court with a headband, so surely they would enforce other silly rules as well.

It was never a secret that Ben Gordon liked to enjoy a pregame meal. Here is Ben Gordon speaking about his pregame delicacies a few years ago: “I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before every game. Whoever invented that was smart. That’s got to be one of the best sandwiches ever.”

Pregame meals aren’t just something that the Bulls “no good” players came up with. Early in his career, Kobe Bryant used to eat Big Macs before games. Now, he eats much healthier of course.

It is ridiculous for the Bulls to be enforcing such a rule. Logically, a rule book would have been passed out, and players reading it would have objected at a silly rule. It’s hard to see a player who reads as much as Gordon does not reading the rule book. He surely would have objected as one of his pregame rituals was outlawed. Perhaps the Bulls just hand out food in the locker room to try to tempt their players, kind of like God putting a snake in the Garden of Eden.

These players are hardly bad seeds, they’re just feeding their bodies so they can go out and perform a professional sport at the high level. It’s not like they are doing some pregame drinking like Shawn Kemp.

If true, it is a good thing that the Bulls are prepared to let Vinny Del Negro go. If they fire him after the season, there is a wide array of prospective head coaches they could go after. They could sign former Mavericks coach, Avery Johnson, who has the highest regular season win percentage of any coach in NBA history. Or they could go after Boston’s defensive guru, Tom Thibodeau.