Is Fred Hoiberg in trouble?

The Chicago Bulls lost to the Atlanta Hawks for the second time in less than a week on Wednesday night. Though the game in Chicago wasn’t the blowout that the game in Atlanta was, it might have been something worse. Fred Hoiberg and his team choked away a late lead, dropped below .500 again, and might have fully checked out on their coach.

Next: Is Jimmy Butler Flopping?

Well, it’s possible that not everyone has checked out on the coach. But there is a reasonable concern that their two stars might be on the outs with the coach.

The biggest example of what could be interpreted as a problem for Hoiberg is this moment in the Wednesday night loss to the Hawks where Jimmy Butler appears to disagree with Hoiberg:

That’s a lot to read into this situation, but it doesn’t seem to be completely wrong.

We’ve also had a whole series of moments throughout the year where strange things happen, like the end of the second loss of the season to the Dallas Mavericks where it appears that Hoiberg called an ATO for a Butler and the star winger was stranded about 30 feet from the basket with no help and time ticking away.

In a moment of sardonic thought, I felt it was fair to run a Twitter poll. You should vote in it before it closes:

To be clear, there is no allusion here that Hoiberg is in serious danger of losing his job, but it is possible that he’s lost Dwyane Wade and Butler.

If Hoiberg ends up losing the confidence of his two stars, he’s pretty much cooked. He’s already got issues with both Rajon Rondo and Michael Carter-Williams, both are unsettled former starting point guards that now spend a lot of time on the bench.

Hoiberg was already rumored to be on the hot seat earlier this season, but it seemed like a stretch at the time. Now, it doesn’t appear that anything has improved and there aren’t any easy wins on the horizon. Hoiberg is the victim of a comically poor roster construction by Gar Forman and John Paxson, but he hasn’t done much with the young players he was supposed to develop. Add to that his star player taking shots at young players post-loss to Atlanta and it’s getting really weird.

I wonder how Hoiberg feels about all of this?

Yeah, that’s about right.

There isn’t a whole lot to read into and not a lot that has changed, but Wednesday night was ugly and produced a lot of quotes and images from the Bulls. None of those moments were good, though they were very entertaining.