dh003i's Journal: Krause the louse

Welp, the wicked witch is metaphorically "dead".

Of course, Krause is known for his unforgivable blunders. He took a 6-time championship team and destroyed it by pushing Phil Jackson, then necessarily Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen out the door. He alienated Jordan and other Bulls team-mates by saying that "players don't win championships, organizations win championships". He put together a squad of losers after the winners left, and the Bulls have endured 5 seasons of total and complete crap.
It's a real shame that the Bulls dynasty was broken up. If they'd stayed together, they would have still been sure-picks for NBA champions for another 2 or 3 years. The LA Lakers would never have amounted to anything. And we wouldn't have to hear this bullshit Kobe Bryant being the next Michael Jordan.

But, Krause was also responsible for assembling the Bulls 6-time championship team. He inherited MJ, but brought in the rest of the pieces -- most importantly, Jackson and Pippen and later Rodman -- that made the Bulls champions. He had an incredible eye for talent. But the success of any team under Krause was surely limited, because he was a bumbler. He wasn't a people-person. Period. He often mis-spoke and was mis-interpreted, because he just didn't know how to say things right.

When he said, "players don't win championships, organizations win championships" what he really meant to say was that it was the combined effort of everyone in the Chicago organization -- players, coaches, management, janitors, doctors, masseuses, and so-one and so-forth -- that resulted in championship victories. He did not mean to take away from what MJ and Pippen and Jackson had accomplished, nor that the Bulls could have won a championship without them. What he meant was that the hard work of everyone on the team was necessary to win. That's true.

But he just didn't say it right. It came off sounding like he was trying to grab all the credit for himself and marginalize the monumental play of Jordan and Pippen, and marginalize the exceptional coaching of Phil Jackson. This is basically how Jordan, Pippen, Jackson, and the rest of the world took Krause' comments -- as marginalizing their critical and enormous contributions. This incident and a slew of others like it lead to the ever-increasing alienation of MJ, Pippen, and Jackson from Krause, and it's what destroyed one of the best dynasties in NBA history.

All of this was because of Krause' inability to effectively communicate and socialize with others in the organization. As I said, he simply was not a people-person. He also certainly wasn't media-presentable. Here was a short, fat, stubby, and quite frankly ugly guy, who had a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, when he really meant to say the right thing at the right time. Really, what Krause needed was a personal translator and media-ist. Someone to translate from Krause => English. From what Krause means to something that the rest of us could have understood properly.

This is not to excuse what the guy did to the Bulls. He was undoubtedly responsible for the destruction of a dynasty, and just because it all resulted from years of miscommunication on his part doesn't excuse him of responsibility. Maybe he wasn't the grinch, but because he was so rough around the edges and such a poor communicator, that's the way he came accross to the rest of us, and that's all that mattered. So the flaw of Krause which destroyed the Bulls was not recognizing his own limitations. He was by no means a competent communicator, so he should have just shut up and stayed focused on acquiring talented personel. Because Krause never seemed to recognize that he was a worse communicator than Al Gore, that he was less inspiring than a log, that he mis-spoke almost every time he opened his mouth, the dismantling of the Bulls was inevitable.