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Jim Boylan was Scott Skiles’s right-hand man, both in Phoenix and here in Chicago with the Bulls, so everyone rightfully wondered what the difference would be when he replaced Skiles as the Bulls’ coach. Quite a bit, as it turns out. Boylan must have been Skiles’s better half, for lack of a better phrase, in dealing with players, and he quickly proved himself a players’ coach compared with Skiles’s taskmaster as the Bulls won four of their first six under his leadership. The evidence was there from his first game, when Boylan made a belated and unassuming entrance to the postgame press conference, saying, “Well, I’m kind of new at this, so I don’t know if I’m supposed to make some kind of statement or you’re just going to ask me some questions, but I do have something to say.”
Even after the Bulls lost a close overtime game to the Orlando Magic on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, Gordon responded in kind, saying of Boylan, “He’s been even-keeled. He doesn’t get too high or too low on any one possession. When guys see Jim being so calm … that helps everybody else to relax.”
