John Hollinger has a message for all the Carlos Boozer haters around the NBA.

"His lack of durability and toothless defense have made him a scapegoat in both Utah and Chicago," Hollinger wrote recently in his Insider profile of Boozer, "But even with those shortcomings he's one of the most productive 4s in basketball."

Let that soak in again. According to Hollinger, Boozer is still one of the most productive 4s in basketball. So why does he continue to take so much verbal abuse amongst a large majority of critics and fans? It wasn't as if Bulls fans didn't know about Boozer's propensity of getting hurt. As Hollinger pointed out, this past season was the fourth time in seven years that the power forward played fewer than 60 games. He has never been a good defender. He wasn't a good one before he came to Chicago, and he seemed to regress as the season went along in Tom Thibodeau's system.

But to many fans, that was the difference as far as Boozer's season was concerned. Obviously, it didn't help that the first impressions Bulls fans had of him was sitting on the bench during the season's opening month in street clothes because of a broken hand. The bigger issue for Boozer was that the Bulls were so good defensively, his weaknesses on that end of the floor stood out more than ever -- especially when he and Joakim Noah were on the floor together.

They just never looked comfortable together on either end of the court. Noah looked like an All-Star without Boozer for the first month of the season before he tore a ligament in his thumb and missed 30 games. Boozer looked like an All-Star himself when he played without Noah during January and most of February. But whenever the pair played together they looked out of sync, an assertion Hollinger agreed with.

"The most interesting statistical morsel from Boozer's season is that defensively, he had much better results as a center than a power forward," Hollinger writes. "Boozer played a lot of minutes alongside Taj Gibson in the frontcourt, especially when Noah was out, and surrendered a 14.2 opponent PER, according to 82games.com; as a power forward, that figure was a more problematic 17.6."

Thibodeau bristled throughout the season when he was asked why Noah and Boozer appeared to struggle on the floor together. He would point to the Bulls league-leading record as proof his team couldn't be struggling that badly. Still, the Bulls never looked like a truly well-oiled machine when the pair played together. That became even more apparent at the end of the season and into the playoffs when Noah would stare at Boozer occasionally and shake his head in frustration at his teammate's defense -- or lack thereof.

Many times, Noah was caught helping on Boozer's man that would leave Noah's man free for an open basket.

Offensively, each player looked a lot more versatile on the floor without the other clogging up space.

"He's way more aggressive," Derrick Rose said of Boozer's play without Noah , after Boozer dropped 24 points and 14 rebounds in a March 30 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves. "I think he changed the game totally, where his double teams, you could definitely throw the ball into him in the post and let him do him. When people double team him it opens up everything on the court."

People can talk about how the Bulls' biggest weakness is the need for a scoring two guard who can take some pressure off of Rose. While that is certainly the team's biggest issue heading into the new season, the other big one, which has gotten lost in the hoopla for another perimeter scorer, is the fact that two of the Bulls' best players didn't complement each other very well on the floor last season. If the Bulls want to take the next step in their progression next year, Thibodeau must find a way for Noah and Boozer to coexist on the floor together on both offense and defense. If they don't the Bulls still won't be able to win a title ... no matter who the two-guard is.