Billy Donovan is approaching the end of his sixth season as the head coach of the Chicago Bulls. During his tenure, the Bulls have won a total of one playoff game. They’ve lost in the Play-In Tournament in the three seasons preceding this one, and, at 29-43, they’re poised to finish 2025-26 with 30-something wins, good for 11th or 12th in the East. They made future-focused moves at the deadline, and, unless they get lucky in the lottery, this rebuild is going to take a while.
Does Donovan have the patience for that? There have been recent rumblings that he “might step away from the mess and take a season to reevaluate what he wants from the profession,” the Chicago Sun-Times’ Joe Cowley reported this week. On Wednesday in Philadelphia, Donovan did little to push back on the idea that his future with the team is up in the air, telling reporters that he’d need to have a conversation about what’s next at the end of the season.
“When I got into coaching, I never did it for the money, and I never really did it for notoriety,” Donovan said. “I love the game, I loved competing, and I felt like outside my parents, the people that had the most influence on me in my life were the guys that coached me.
“I never really thought, ‘Hey, listen, I’m going to get into coaching because I want to be in the Hall of Fame.’ I wanted to get into coaching to win and for the competing part and trying to get a group of guys to compete. So I never looked at it from a legacy standpoint as much as when the season comes to an end, how are we going to work to get into a place where we’re really competing and how do we build this out moving forward? Those are the things that we need to talk about.
“Selfishly, competitively, I want us to be in that situation where we’re playing in real legitimate, not that these [regular-season games] aren’t legitimate, but you’re in the playoffs, you’re going through a seven-game series and you’re trying to advance and move on.”
…
“Whatever words you want to use, we’re pivoting right now, so a lot of it is going to be me sitting down with ownership, with Arturas, to find out, ‘OK, what’s the next step?'” Donovan said. “Because I think the biggest thing with the moves that were made at the [trade] deadline was, ‘OK, how do we get out of the middle? And if we’re taking a step back, what do we have to do to take a step forward where we’re actually building something where, yeah, we may have to go through a plan again, but how are we going to get into a playoff?'”
Notably, Donovan, who coached Florida to national championships in 2006 and 2007, did not deny having interest in the open North Carolina job, saying only that his “main focus” is on coaching this Chicago team. It is also notable that he was so forthright about wanting to be back in the playoffs, given some of his previous comments.
Before parting ways with the Oklahoma City Thunder, Donovan reportedly turned down a two-year contract extension. When the team announced his exit in 2020, general manager Sam Presti said in a statement that it had “become apparent that we couldn’t provide him the information on the future direction of the team over the next several seasons to give him the level of clarity that he understandably desires at this stage of his career.”
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Most people interpreted this to mean that Donovan had no interest in presiding over a rebuilding team. Donovan later said that wasn’t accurate.
“The situation in Oklahoma City is totally different,” Donovan told reporters in February 2025, after the Bulls traded Zach LaVine to the Sacramento Kings. “I think there was maybe a lot of things said or put out there publicly that I had no interest in a rebuild. That’s not true. I never said that. I never felt like that. To me, it’s all about the direction and where we are going and do they want me to be a part of that? When we talk about rebuild, retool, whatever term you want to use, that’s all I’ve been a part of. I took over a program at Florida with two straight losing seasons. I don’t only want to coach ready-made teams; that’s not what I am about. Clearly, we’re making a shift. I want to be part of building something.”
A year later, after the flurry of moves that sent Ayo Dosunmu, Coby White and Nikola Vučević packing, Donovan reaffirmed that he wanted to be a part of turning the team around.
“Yeah, the part about the OKC thing, even when I kind of came [to the Bulls] it was a rebuild in terms of we had a lot of young guys, there were some decisions that were going to be made,” Donovan said. “To be honest with you, most of my time in college was to rebuild teams and rosters. We have to sit down as an organization quite honestly, myself, ownership and front office, and find the direction, the clarity, of, again, the roster is kind of flipped, right?
“I’ve talked to you guys about what’s important to me is the mentality, the competitiveness, that kind of stuff, and things can happen quickly too. Look at what Detroit was able to do. They were really bad for a while and they took off and have done really well.
“You look at a team like Boston, where they shed a bunch of salary cap and people thought they weren’t going to be any good and now they’re second in the East, so things can happen pretty quickly.”
In a way, Donovan’s most recent comments are consistent with what he has been saying all along: He needs to be on the same page as Artūras Karnišovas’ front office, and he wants to coach a competitive team. The vibe is different, though, because of the context.
Chicago is 5-18 since the beginning of February, and Donovan is a couple of months away from his 61st birthday. He may not be demanding a “ready-made team,” but that doesn’t mean he’s prepared to endure another season like this, especially if there is a more attractive opportunity available to him — perhaps like one in Chapel Hill.
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