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It's official: Scott Skiles is the new head coach of the Bucks, signing a fully-guaranteed four-year deal on Monday afternoon. For all the reasons that Tom Ziller explained yesterday, Skiles is a good fit: the Bucks need to improve on defense and sharing the ball, both of which can be improved with effort and focus. If anyone can get that out of a team, it's Skiles. His personality may wear thin after a few years, but he's a great stepping stone for a team starting near the bottom.

Skiles is actually a close friend of the recently fired Larry Krystkowiak, but I hope Michael Redd doesn't hold that against him. Krystkowiak talked about his firing over the weekend, and the way he tells it, Redd's selfishness during games sabotaged Krystkowiak's best efforts to get the team to share the ball. From the Milwaukee J-S:

"There was a different mind-set in practice than there was in a game," Krystkowiak said. "It was like two different types of teams so we could never address sharing and moving the basketball because we did a decent job of it in practice. It was in games where it didn't happen. . . . Things became very focused on scoring points and that's Mike. Truly great players make the players around them better.

"A lot of times in practice he would defer and wouldn't be as scoring-minded and so I don't know how you're supposed to get better as a team when . . . practice was different than games."

For the record, Redd did make a conscious effort to distribute the ball this year. He talked about it early in the year, and he finished the season averaging two fewer field goal attempts and four fewer points per game than he did a year ago, all while averaging a career-high 3.4 assists per game. Maybe he didn't do enough, but you can't say he didn't try.