A Billy Donovan exit would affirm the Bulls are minor league

what situation would make a coach willingly leave the NBA?

It’s been a little over a year on Substack. Thanks to everyone who is reading, even better if you subscribe (maybe do so even if you don’t want the emails, just route them to spam and I can enjoy seeing the stats), and even better-better if you donated. Some of you even had the auto-renewal for a yearly subscription trigger despite my warnings, lol. That must mean you just want to support the cause, I’m honored!

As I said after the trade deadline, it’s a relief to be off of a ‘blog network’ where I was contracted to post. This team doesn’t deserve daily fan coverage. In so many of the past ten years I’ve had to plead and scramble to get #content up this time of year and now I just…don’t.

(I will host a big game preview and live thread for the play-in contest)

You can see it in these internet streets: people just don’t care. There are like 25 too many Bulls podcasts, but I follow a lot of them and can’t help but notice that there are just fewer and fewer episodes down to outright dormancy. Old BlogABull contributor and longtime “Bulls Twitter” (ugh) denizen Mark K. outright quit the game. That wasn’t outright due to lack of interest in the Bulls but it certainly was a factor.

After the outright kick-in-the-balls of that trade deadline press conference, the team has offered nothing to get excited about. Just more injuries, forcing lesser players into more minutes, who then also get injured. Javonte Green has returned, just to make it certain that even when Arturas Karnisovas makes a change, it’s for someone he and we are already familiar with.

There was the league-wide ignominy of the ‘double-dunk’ (miss) by Torrey Craig and Andre Drummond. It certainly made every NBA fan take notice that the Bulls are still in the league, and still playing games:

The thing about this iteration of the Bulls is that they are boring. A team that can be penciled in for 40-45 wins, with most of its possessions being soaked up by the likes of DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic, is not a team designed to get anyone out of their seats. Craig has spent this whole season, his first in Chicago, coming to terms with that fact, and on Tuesday night he decided to do something about it, dammit.

Beyond that, the discussion around the team recently has been mostly just jokes derived from the prompt: “how shamelessly can AK spin this after the season?”

Until the past few days, when we got rumors that head coach Billy Donovan might leave the team after the season and work for University of Kentucky, which operates a high revenue minor league basketball team of their own.

I think the juiciness of such rumors are exaggerated by how boring the Bulls are. Not only presently, but the hopelessness in their future. Donovan left Oklahoma City for the Bulls with years left on his OKC contract because he didn’t want to coach a rebuilding, young team.

That decision looks bad in terms of success, but Donovan has undoubtedly gotten perks from his landing of the Bulls job. There’s the measured benefit of an extremely high, long-term salary. But also the professional comfort of having no expectations. I don’t think Karnisovas has said a single critical word about coaching during his tenure, and only mentions Donovan to praise him. All reports are that Donovan enjoys that degree of partnership with AK and ownership (likely has some say in personnel, too), and the media more or less figures nothing is really Donovan’s fault. The Bulls hired his son too.

But there are intrinsic downsides with the job. He has to actually coach this team a few nights a week, and take some public flak for not maximizing what’s objectively an ill-fitting and talent-bereft roster. I don’t think Donovan is a better-than-average coach, but any criticism of his playing rotations and strategy is more an indictment of what he has to work with than anything else. The Bulls front office tradition of hiding from media does require Donovan to be the public face of the oft-ridiculed organization, which is a role that includes being the sole source of depressing Lonzo Ball health non-updates that nobody is actually asking for.

Donovan is a competitive person who’s achieved a ton in his career, which is why when he says he likes coaching in the NBA it makes sense that he’d want to stay. The NBA head coach gets to be in a glamour market and travel well to others, versus Lexington, Kentucky or to some high-schooler’s family room.

But the Chicago Bulls are in the NBA only nominally. They have perhaps the absolute worst combination in the league of present boringness and future hopelessness. Donovan may see that even if AK doesn’t, and like he did when leaving OKC he’ll decide not to go through the next couple years: it’s not hard to figure this will end like nearly every NBA coaching job does, fired after disappointment.

If it does happen, sadly (yet appropriately) the conversation won’t turn to who will next coach the Bulls, but how AK will shamelessly spin it? I’d like to think even he would feel embarrassment if Donovan quits for a lesser league, but he’s proven me wrong before.