Scott Skiles, Bucks to part ways; Jim Boylan takes over

On Tuesday, the Bucks decided to permanently part ways with Skiles, allowing the veteran coach to walk away from a team that’s currently seventh in the Eastern Conference standings with a 17-16 record. Milwaukee has struggled badly on offense all season, though, something that’s plagued Skiles’ teams throughout his coaching career.

Considering that Skiles is the only NBA head coach that Jennings has ever played for, it’s not especially surprising that he’s disappointed with the change. A coach known for being rather intense, Jennings said of his former coach, “I told him one thing I did learn from him was how he approached the game with a seriousness -- just giving your all every night.”

Skiles told Charles F. Gardner of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that report was false:

The Bucks organization released a statement with the news of the firing on Tuesday and said it was a mutual decision. The coach and General Manager John Hammond met Monday afternoon and decided it was time to move in another direction.

Hammond joined the Bucks in 2008 and took over for General Manager Larry Harris, but there hasn’t been much to this point on his place moving forward. It now appears that Milwaukee owner Herb Kohl will look to lock up Hammond, who flirted with leaving the organization for Portland in April 2012.

Hammond has led the Bucks to one playoff berth in 2009-2010 and won the NBA’s executive of the year that season.

Skiles, an intense defensive-minded coach, has been known to wear on players in his various stops in the NBA, but his fiery style doesn’t appear to have affected his relationship with his mercurial young PG.

Jennings took an unorthodox route to the NBA, forgoing the NCAA to play in Italy for a season, but Skiles, a former NBA PG, still installed him as Milwaukee’s primary ball-handler as a rookie and never looked back. Jennings made an early splash, including a memorable 55-point explosion in his seventh game in the NBA, but his inability to shoot more efficiently from the field has held him back ever since.

The Milwaukee Bucks lost Scott Skiles right around midnight Tuesday, with Sam Amick’s scoop saying that it was mutual. In fact, NBA.com’s David Aldridge reported on Monday that Skiles wanted to leave during the offseason as he didn’t agree with -- or worse, recognize -- general manager John Hammond’s plan forward.

The Bucks are currently No. 27 in the league in offense, and it’s clearly efficient scoring that’s holding the team back. The thing is: this was the problem a couple years back when the Bucks were hanging around the bottom of the East playoff bracket, where they are know. This is why the Bucks flipped Andrew Bogut and his interminable unavailability for scoring wizard Monta Ellis, thinking the explosive guard would fix the offense.

Three coaches being fired in the early going isn’t particularly unusual, but what is surprising is that all three teams are squads in playoff contention. The Lakers were everybody’s preseason NBA Finals pick, hence the disappointment with the poor start, but the Nets and Bucks both found themselves sitting at .500 when a coaching change was made.

Is it normal for teams to want to switch things up with a team potentially headed for the postseason? Not particularly. Here’s a look at every team that’s fired their coach in the last five seasons, heading back to the last time Scott Skiles lost his job in the middle of the year.