The Bratwurst – Milwaukee Bucks Blog

Since it’s a foregone conclusion that the Larry Krystkowiak era has one game remaining, Peter Vecesy reported in the New York Post that John Hammond is already charging ahead with searching for his next coach.

According to Vecesy, Hammond has checked in with Larry Brown, but “Don’t let that fool you,” a second source underlined. “John is considering either (Scott) Skiles or (Rick) Carlisle, no one else.”

The problem with Carlisle is that he is apparently the #1 candidate for the Bulls job as well.

Skiles presents a different issue — his hard-driving style gets results, but grates on players after a period of time causing them to tune him out. Skiles basically quit as coach of the Bulls this season because he felt he had lost the team and did the same thing in Phoenix in 2001-02 (although, in his defense, I would have quit too if my team had just traded Jason Kidd for Stephon Marbury).

A Skiles detractor would call him a quitter, a Skiles defender would call him a realist who understands the limits of his coaching style. I’d call him a very good coach who is probably better at building a team than carrying it to the finals. But that’s what this team needs.

Meanwhile, before Monday’s pickup game that passed as Bucks vs. Bulls, Larry Krystkowiak (whose eyes are clearly wide open regarding his job status) made an interesting comment to Tom Enlund of the Journal-Sentinel about his tenure as head coach:

Krystkowiak was asked if he thought he’d been given the chance to coach the team the way he wanted to do so.

After a 16-second pause, Krystkowiak said: “Let’s put it this way. If I had to do it over again, things would be different. Some of that was self-inflicted and some of that was external. But beyond that . . . no sour apples here. I’m going to focus on as much of the positives as I can and chalk a lot of stuff up to experience. Maybe someday down the road we can revisit some stuff. But I don’t think now is the time.”

I’ve been hard on Krystkowiak all season for coaching his system instead of something more complementary for the players he had, but this quote makes is seem that Krystkowiak is well aware of that — but also coming into the season believed that he and Larry Harris would have more ability to control who was on the roster.

Of course, if that’s what he thought then he was kidding himself.

Anybody who took an objective look at this roster at the beginning of the season would have realized that it had better be good because there wasn’t much that anybody could do to change it. As newly signed free agents, Mo, Mason and Bell were ineligible to be traded. Charlie V and Simmons were untradeable because they were coming off of major injuries, and Gadzuric was untradeable because he sucks at the game of basketball. Maybe Harris had sold Krystkowiak on the pipe dream that they might be able to lure Chauncey Billups or Gerald Wallace to Milwaukee, but that was never happening.

For all of my complaining about Krystkowiak, ultimately he was submarined by his own players. Yi was not nearly as good as advertised, Simmons had a wasted season, and Redd and Mo spent the whole season in some sort of strange “I’m Mr. Big Shot” battle. This team simply wasn’t very good.

Now, at the end of his run with the Bucks, Krystkowiak is doing the right thing by not publicly burning any bridges and letting himself fade away, heading back to a college job where he belongs.