Tom Thibodeau will bring wins to the New Orleans Pelicans

Tom Thibodeau was fired by the Chicago Bulls earlier today. Everyone saw it coming, even if the Bulls had faint hopes of extracting compensation from either the Orlando Magic or New Orleans Pelicans. Those two franchises called the Bulls bluff and Thibodeau was sent packing. The press release announcing the decision was seen by many as petty on the part of the Bulls organization. This is, of course, par for the course when talking about the Bulls. BlogaBull has covered it thoroughly already.

It's impossible not to draw parallels back to the last time the Bulls were good, when Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson won six championships.

Even back then, ownership was still cheap as hell: many of their problems came because they wouldn't renegotiate a contract Pippen had clearly out-performed. They were spiteful and jealous, too: instead of thanking the heavens for the good fortune that brought them Jordan, Krause said "players and coaching don't win championships; organizations win championships."

There are, rightfully, concerns about Thibodeau's ability to manage the workload of his players during the season. Note I did not write minutes. Workload to include the frequency, duration, and intensity of both practices and shootarounds prior to tip-off. Thibodeau and the Bulls have a lengthy history behind the scenes, explained in some depth by Kelly Dwyer here for Ball Don't Lie.

What about the Pelicans?

Tom Thibodeau is an excellent coach. Five Thirty Eight dove into the numbers and found that Thibodeau coached teams routinely exceed their preseason expectations by an average of 7.5 a season. His teams also outperform expectations in the playoffs as well. None of this takes into account Derrick Rose missing 181 regular season games over the course of three seasons.

And Thibodeau’s Bulls teams have, on balance, gone further in the playoffs than they were projected to. During his tenure as Chicago’s coach, the Bulls have accumulated 625 dynasty points — 13.1 points more than would have been expected from the talent levels of his teams. (In 2015 alone, he racked up 40 more dynasty points than expected.)

That total "only" ranks 24th among NBA coaches since 1984,1 and it’s nowhere near the gaudy 6,606-point (!!) surplus generated by playoff god Phil Jackson, one of Thibodeau’s predecessors with the Bulls. But it flies in the face of the idea that the Bulls had a disappointing playoff record on Thibodeau’s watch.

Essentially, he extracted an incredible number of wins out of his talent base during the regular season and took the team a little bit further than expected during the playoffs to boot. Teams can get (and have gotten) a lot less from their head coach.

Can Tom Thibodeau work with the Pelicans front office? Judging any coach's ability to mesh with management based solely on his experiences with the Chicago Bulls, considering their long and troubled history with coaches, seems foolish. There are red flags to be sure. Anthony Davis has not been a picture of health, and managing his workload throughout the year properly is critical to the long term goals of this franchise.

Those concerns will be addressed, undoubtedly, when Tom Thibodeau and Dell Demps sit down for their first interview in the coming days. Thibodeau's answers will go a long way to determining if he is the next head coach of the New Orleans Pelicans.