At long last, the Chicago Bulls have fired head coach Jim Boylen

With the NBA bubble in full swing, the Chicago Bulls have just made their own big splash by firing head coach Jim Boylen.

Take a deep breath, Chicago Bulls fans. Your long nightmare has come to an end.

On Friday morning, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski broke the news that embattled Bulls head coach Jim Boylen had been fired.

While rooting for the termination of employment for just about anybody feels grimy, sometimes that objection can go out the window when a person was never qualified for or capable of doing the job in the first place, and that’s the case with Boylen.

After taking over from Fred Hoiberg following his dismissal as head coach in December of 2018, Boylen immediately caused a near-mutiny by his players. That’s right, he took over on a Monday and by Saturday the team planned a mutiny to protest excessively grueling practices.

It’s a bad start and things never really got that much better for Jim Boylen or his Chicago Bulls players, compiling a 39-84 record along the way.

In late July, Bulls rookie Daniel Gafford had some things of his own to say about Boylen. On a Twitch stream, he said the following when asked about his coach:

"“He aight. I don’t like him a lot, but he OK. Got some things he can work on, got some things he can get better at as a person and as a coach.”"

Quite the rousing endorsement from your rookie.

Forward Lauri Markkanen had major concerns about the way Boylen chose to use him, saying this on a Finnish podcast in May: (transcription via On Tap Sports)

"“I had 80 touches per game the past two seasons, this season the touches dropped to 40. Don’t get me wrong, I had some plays drawn with me in mind, but it’s just different. When I spoke with Jim [Boylen], we talked about how I should concentrate on getting rebounds and then leading the fast break. But it’s just really hard getting 40 defensive rebounds.”"

His players disliked him, they mistrusted to utilize them properly and Chicago Bulls ownership finally made the move to change management, hiring Arturas Karnisovas as their executive vice president of basketball operations and moving on from the two-headed monster of John Paxson and Gar Forman.

With all these factors combined, it seems as though the clock was ticking on Boylen, but until Friday it was hard to say which way things would go for him. Bulls’ owner Jerry Reinsdorf is known to be spectacularly cheap, and there were concerns that due to the financial concerns brought on by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, he would decide to force Karnisovas to keep Boylen.

Maybe that was the original plan, considering how long it took to finally give him the boot, but the right move was made in the end.

It’s been a surprisingly good year for the Chicago Bulls so far, all things considered in this pandemic ravaged world. With ESPN’s Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance reminding us of glory days gone by, Karnisovas’s hiring and now Boylen’s firing, things are looking up for the basketball team in the Windy City.