Joel Lorenzi

You need a real clean slate to me.

And I thought what's underrated in all this is Sam picked a guy like Mark Dagnall who had no reputation to lose.

he was this risky, ballsy coach for them in the G League who could be groomed alongside a roster that they needed to build from the ground up.

But they started from the ground up.

They started with assets, picks, all this stuff.

And Mark ended up being, like, in a lot of ways...

a mirror of Sam and that he could help set and sustain a culture, um, knew how to talk to people and communicate, knew how to talk to players and, and want, have, have it so players want to play for him, um, was good at, is good at the development thing, um, is great at messaging, um,

I don't know how many Mark Dagnalls are out there available, but you're limiting your chances here with some of the messaging ahead of the hiring process.

No, and the bottom line of everything you described is risk.

You require risk, and I think the Bulls and Michael are just too comfortable in their ways, like signaling...

that you are prioritizing Billy to the point where you're like, well, and for what it's worth, like our, our guy, John Greenberg at the athletic emailed Michael to follow up after the presser.

And Michael told him something along the lines of all he was saying is he thinks Billy's a good coach and that the bar should be that you respect Billy, but he's, he's made it really clear that he wants Billy to be, to return as the coach.

And he's even saying stuff like,

oh, if Billy wants to have this conversation about being Brad Stevens, like we'll have the conversation, which, which to me is like, you are handcuffing yourself to an insane degree.

And so like, again, I go back to risk.

It took risk to hire Mark, who I believe was like, he's very, I mean, he's still one of the youngest coaches in the NBA.

He might've been like,

uh, like low thirties when he got hired, something like that, like something crazy, uh, that takes risk, um, understanding, uh, bringing someone in who like, sure.

You want some alignment with, with the front office and ownership, but somebody who's going to push back on ideas too.

Like you, you need that.