He has tried before. For the most part, it has worked. Worked well enough to win two NCAA championships at Florida, to infamously have a 3-1 lead on the 73-win Warriors in the 2016 Western Conference finals with the Thunder, to be inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame this year.
He’s the brain while most other NBA coaches are Pinky. But for his five-plus years here in Chicago, what was supposed to pop off ain’t. The glimpses have been few, the promise of what could (should) be, less.
With the contract extension he signed with the Bulls in the offseason, this season opened up as fresh and new and thought-sustainable as Tate McRae and Addison Rae. Then everything returned to normal — the sub-normal that has shaped his legacy here.
The Bulls are still under .500, still in 10th place in the East, still in the play-in game if the season ended today. Not a damn thing actually changed. Not saying it’s all on him, but as both head coach and head common denominator in this reality sitcom, it leaves open all kinds of dubiety. Why is what Billy Donovan is doing not working?
“For our team to take another step, there are things on both ends of the floor that we’ve got to improve upon,” Donovan said during NBA TV’s “exclusive” look inside the Bulls’ practice two weeks ago, while they were in the middle of a seven-game losing streak. “Until we can address those things that we’ve got to get better at, it’s hard to really take the growth with a young team that you want to take. These guys have done that. It’s part of the reason we got off to a good start. But everybody gets better over the course of the year, and we have to get better.”
Was the “step” he spoke of backward or forward? Because the opposite of getting better over the course of the year is opening the season on a five-game “W” streak, only to win two games in a row one time since.
But it doesn’t seem to be Donovan’s words that aren’t working during practices, in the locker room, during in-game timeouts. It could simply be his demeanor. His overall chill. His lack of a true sense of intentionality and urgency.
The “what Billy is doing that isn’t working” in all of this basketball genius and game-planning is not creating a sense of desperation his team can feed from. He opened the season by transitioning the Bulls into a transition team that played at a pace that had teams dead-ass tired by the fourth quarter. No opponent had the stamina to outlast the Bulls with their 2025 elevated style of play. For at least the last month, it’s his team that looks cooked at the ends of games.
The other thing that may explain the Bulls — outside of past apathy and current inconsistency — is the evidence that they often play down to the competition and/or team on the schedule. How else can they explain losing already to three of the four worst teams in the East (the Hornets, the Nets and the Pacers twice) and the worst team in the West (the Pelicans) twice?
Is it little things? Like allowing the then-4-16 Pacers to score 35 on them in the second quarter Nov. 29, only to hold the Pacers to 17 in the fourth quarter, only to lose on a buzzer-beater by Pascal Siakam? (Shooting 56% from the free-throw line in that game didn’t help.) Or is it the obvious: allowing the Heat — the team that has been the Packers to their Bears, the team that literally ended their season three years in a row — to put up 143 to their 107 in a Cup game in front of their home crowd?
Pick either poison and it all comes back to this: Why, when it comes to play on the court — for whichever players are on the floor, for his entire tenure here — are the results the same with Donovan’s squads?
What’s that thing they say about insanity?
The problem with coaching is that sometimes you can actually be too good at it. One’s foresight and insight can be so advanced that the microscopic nuances that differentiate stacking wins and stacking losses get lost — or in this case maybe not infused.
Rams coach Sean McVay, kinda the antithetical opposite of Donovan right now for the energy he’s instilled in his team since his arrival, said after his team’s most recent loss: “I’m not making excuses — we don’t do that. I don’t believe in that. It doesn’t move us forward.” Well, if excuses don’t move teams forward, what do reasons do?
While Donovan may not be teaching the Bulls how not to lose (a drastic difference from knowing how to win), since 2020 as the third member of the Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley trio, he definitely is not coaching them on the art of willing wins, as has become more evident and prevalent this season than any other. Willing victories comes from passion, not intellect nor intelligence. Will over skill. Psychology over strategy. All of that cliché BS that ain’t cliché when it works.
Because for five years and counting, we know what ain’t working.