Fred Hoiberg’s Conundrum: What to do with Bobby Portis and Nikola Mirotic

The sanity of one individual can only stretch so far, Fred Hoiberg has nearly reached his limit as the right rotation for the power forward position escapes him, just like this season has.

There is no end to the amount of purely baffling decisions Hoiberg makes. He seems unable to draw up an actual play at the end of games and appears equally mystified by after timeout, baseline and sideline out of bounds plays. Sure, not all of it is on Hoiberg.

Gar Forman handed him a rotten egg of a roster as a rookie coach, throwing him into the deep end. In year two, he’s had to deal with Rajon Rondo and Dwyane Wade being introduced to a roster that is worth all of 10 or 12 wins without Jimmy Butler.

Then there’s the rotations. Hoiberg is culpable for his poor playcalling, even if the roster is anything but optimal. He has failed to find the right balance and veers from one rotation and lineup to another the way you’d expect a drunken pledge to walk a sobriety line.

After trading two important pieces in their rotation to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott, it seemed that the way might be cleared to provide more playing time for some of the young players on the roster that had failed to establish themselves or emerge from the shadows of the veterans ahead of them in experience and talent.

Enter Bobby Portis, starting power forward. The second-year forward out of Arkansas has been an on-again off-again player for Chicago. He has struggled and excelled during stints with the NBA side, while racking up empty stats when facing D-League or Las Vegas Summer League competition. Despite showing little as a rookie, there was enough in his Summer League performance to make him look like a player taking shape as an athletic shooter with decent range that could stretch the power forward position, perhaps all the way to the 3-point line. He still has another two years of team control on his contract that won’t break $2.5 million in any single year.

Conversely, Nikola Mirotic had already carved out his development in Europe, excelling while playing in Spain before making the jump to the United States and the NBA. He slotted in somewhere between a starter, a backup and a third option in the rotation at different points in time during his first two seasons in the league. His story was that he would be extremely inconsistent, but provided flashes of the player that drew comparisons to Dirk Nowitzki and Paul Pierce. Those comparisons are clearly way off base, even as Mirotic hasn’t reached his full potential in this, his third and final year under contract with the Bulls at $5.78 million.

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The reasoning behind playing either forward as the primary starter is simple enough – you start Portis if you’re working toward the future, you start Mirotic if you’re trying to win your way into the playoffs right now.

Also, some would say that Mirotic should be kept for the future because he offers a considerable amount of upside that Portis isn’t showing right now, and might never have. Still, decisions have to be made and those decisions do not fall to either you or me.

Back to the mess that is Hoiberg, and Forman. How maddening must it be to coach a team that wasn’t built around your coaching style, your principles of play or match your coaching style and personality? How quickly does that boyish charm corrode from Hoiberg’s face when Butler waves off his playcall or Rondo throws a towel in the face of an assistant or teammates wage war against each other and the coach on social media and to the media itself. Subtweets on Twitter, rants on Instagram, complaining to the media, in-game incredulities – it all ends up to a frayed Hoiberg. It wasn’t more than three months ago that the rumors were sent through Basketball Internet that Hoiberg was the coach most on the hot seat. He’s still here, but for how long? Perhaps, for as long as his sanity can hold.

Portis has played 114 games as of Sunday, March 19. He has started 17 of those games. 12 of those starts have come in the past 13 games. During that stretch, Portis averaged 21.5 minutes, 9.2 points, and 6.6 rebounds – all of which would be good for career-best numbers over the course of a season. The caveat is, perhaps, that his overall shooting numbers are down slightly from 44.4 percent on his career to 42.6 percent during that starting stretch.

Mirotic has played 206 games and is a career 40.1 percent shooter from the field during, hitting 34 percent from 3-point range during that time. When he’s been good, he’s been very good. When he’s bad, just might as well watch out.

Despite a string of starts, Portis only played 25-plus minutes in three of his 12 starts before returning to the bench for Chicago’s victory of the Utah Jazz on Saturday. He was a starter, though mostly in name as he struggled to secure substantial playing time. Mirotic, on the other hand, saw significantly more playing time – when he played. During that stretch when Portis was starting, Mirotic received two DNPs and one inactive.

When Mirotic returned to duty, after a 3-game demotion, he took the majority of minutes and played his best game of the season. He put up a double-double of 24 points and 11 rebounds off the bench against Charlotte, and stayed on the bench behind Portis for two more games. In that same game, Portis had five points and seven rebounds against the Hornets.

Hoiberg, wondering if he could really taste the colors he was seeing or if that was just the side effects of the prescription he needs to deal with this roster and the Forman-John Paxson combo, felt that he needed to stick with Portis in the starting role. To be fair, that makes perfect sense if you look at the considerable inconsistencies of Mirotic’s career. We all know he has the talent, but often enough he has failed to produce that talent in any discernable way. In his three games after his Hoiberg-dictated timeout, before returning to the starting lineup, Mirotic never played less than 27 minutes. As the backup. In those same three games, Portis never broke 21 minutes. As the starter.

And then there was the Utah game. Hoiberg decided it was time to move Mirotic to the starting lineup. He was getting more minutes and playing better basketball than Portis, which is easy enough to believe. And this move also seemed to indicate that HoiGarPax was again trying to win games instead of developing for the future.

Mirotic started against the Jazz and it was his first start since December 3, 2016. After playing 27-plus minutes in three straight games, scoring 14 or more in each of those contests, Mirotic came out and shot 1-for-5 from 3-point range, 2-for-7 overall, and played barely 17 minutes. Portis? Well, he probably had his best game as a pro.

Bobby shot 6-for-6 in the first half and finished the game shooting 10-for-13 with 22 points and five rebounds. It was the best version of Portis we’ve seen. It was the kind of game you hope to see in a young player that you’ve put your faith in to start for your team down the stretch in a year when the eighth seed in the East is probably a best-case scenario. The only problem was that Portis wasn’t the starter anymore.

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There’s only 12 games left in the season and things are so incredibly tight between the teams at the bottom of the standings that on Sunday night, the Milwaukee Bucks moved up one place in the standings without playing a game and the Miami Heat dropped two spots with their loss. As fragile as the standings are in the East, Hoiberg’s grasp on sanity in Chicago must be just as fragile.

This Mirotic-Portis situation might be the perfect microcosm for the Bulls season. Hoiberg, Forman, and Paxson have been waging a war that they lose at every turn. They haven’t tanked, but their roster building and work in-game has caused them to lose. They’re starting Portis when Mirotic is having the best games of his season and they’re late in reacting to Mirotic’s ability, placing their bets on a hot hand right after it cools.

Chicago is chasing the right rotation and right player at power forward, just like they’re chasing the right path for a lost season and they’re falling over themselves in their clumsy effort to do so. Meanwhile, Hoiberg is left clinging to a job, to a rotation, to a shot at the playoffs and to his sanity.