Are people too hard on Billy Donovan?

[Infinity2152]

Donovan was brought here to win games. Not develop young guys, win games. Has to coach the players that are on the team. Let's talk about the core and how they are widely considered, represented in here:

Lavine: Highly overpaid, bad defensively, most prominent complaint: "Does not contribute to wins"
Derozan: Love him, ball stopper, no three point threat, shrinks the floor, bad defender
Vucevic: Bad inconsistent shooter, worst defensive center in the league, kills entire team's defense single handedly
White: Has progressed to inconsistent, decent three point shooter we may or may not re-sign, bad defender
Ball: Barely had him, missed out on the $20 mill worth of players we could have had instead
Williams: Basically our only power forward the whole time, when he played. Plus, he's Pat Will.

Sounds like easily the worst defensive team in the league and guaranteed not to win many games, right? Your main guys are the "doesn't contribute to wins", "ball stopper non-shooter", and "bad shooting defensive sieve". 30 wins, tops? Plus Lavine and Williams have missed a ton of time. We almost NEVER had the best player on the court starting games.

Somehow, last four years have been 46, 40, 39, 39 wins. Nobody wants to be mid, but I challenge anyone to say Billy would have gotten more wins each season if he played his roster different. If he didn't start Pat Will, we should expect 50 wins/season with DJJ or Javonte Green starting? If he plays Drummond more, we're a 50 win team?

Micromanaging is one thing. Overall, I'd say Billy has coached the teams to more wins than could be expected, a lot more. Imo, a coach's job is to coach the team to as many wins as you can. Imagine if he had a team that actually fit together, or some nights we actually had the best 2-3 players on the court.

[jordanwilliams6]

Billy is an adequately solid coach and probably good for this current developing group.

He's incredible mediocre and not good enough to crack the top rung of coaches. He's in that 15-20 range and is probably best suited to being an elite college coach.

[NZB2323]

I’ve been rooting for this team to tank the past 2 years and they keep winning games. Billy deserves credit for that, and he did have the team as the 1st seed in the East before Ball got injured.

He’s not the best coach in the league, but he’s probably better than any replacement we would have for him.

[Infinity2152]

I’ve been rooting for this team to tank the past 2 years and they keep winning games. Billy deserves credit for that, and he did have the team as the 1st seed in the East before Ball got injured.

He’s not the best coach in the league, but he’s probably better than any replacement we would have for him.

Agree here. Actual success is the biggest indicator to me, and he's exceeded the number of wins I'd expect an average or mediocre coach to achieve with these players. What coach was getting defense out of those guys? Kings coach has two of our Big 3 and a better version of Vucevic, how's that looking? We're all saying "They should have known it wouldn't work!"

[MissileMike]

Are people in here actually hard on BD? I think we all agree he's a solid coach, no?

[samwana]

We tend to agree to that more or less as long as no in game decisions are made.
Adjusting to the defense, holding veteran players accountable, stopping opponent runs, trying out (different) out of bounds plays etc. are not a strength if BD and I don't think that will change a lot.

And yes I think Demar ignored a lot of BD or even worse BD just let him play his style.

All in all I think he can manage veteran egos, because he let's them play. I don't think that's the best for all players and not always the best for the team either.

He's average, playin coach. Not more.

[Infinity2152]

He was just called incredibly mediocre three posts ago, lol. See a lot of comments, "He should start Collins, but he won't", "Billy doesn't play guards", "Never should have played Pat Will" etc. Most recent is the insistence he'll play Vucevic over Collins and he shouldn't do that. Just had a thought that with all these criticisms of Bull players, coaching around .500 is a pretty remarkable feat, if those guys are really that bad. Just showing hm some appreciation, I think this team consistently winning 39-40 games is pretty underrated, considering.

Don't think we've seen nearly the best of Billy. If he consistently had a Steph Curry/Jimmy Butler, Draymond, Jokic/Murray/Porter Jr/Gordon, Lebron/AD, Tatum/Brown/White/Porzingas/Holiday, how many wins do we have? Just listing that Celtics lineup makes me feel for what Billy had to work with and compete against .

Could do the same over last few years with Knicks, OKC, Rockets, Phoenix, Dallas, we've been really lacking on high end talent.

[sco]

The good:
- He keeps vets from quitting on a non-contending team
- He seems to be effective getting across what guys need to improve to them (not that it always has the desired results)
- He did a good job of developing some our young players
- He keeps dirty laundry inhouse

The bad:
- In game coaching adjustments
- Line-ups

Overall, he's above average. Probably as good as we could get to work with this FO and roster.

[2weekswithpay]

Maybe. I think most here see AK and Jerry as bigger problems and are indifferent to Billy. I don't have an issue with him, as I don't believe he's holding the team back. I'd argue that Billy is getting more wins out of his teams than the average coach would.

[Infinity2152]

The good:
- He keeps vets from quitting on a non-contending team
- He seems to be effective getting across what guys need to improve to them (not that it always has the desired results)
- He did a good job of developing some our young players
- He keeps dirty laundry inhouse

The bad:
- In game coaching adjustments
- Line-ups

Overall, he's above average. Probably as good as we could get to work with this FO and roster.

Good point. No top coach is racing to coach this roster.

Back to results: If Billy made every "correct" in game coaching adjustment, every "correct" lineup that people say he should do, do we win more than 40 games a year with the same roster? Could the improvement in defense be neutralized by the decrease in offense, for instance? Our defense be even worse because we're NOT playing Pt Will, as the only other player above 6'6 besides Vuc and whatever backup center we have at the moment.

Know why I think Jalen Smith doesn't play? Vucevic and Collins kick his ass every practice. Billy gets to see who can play and who can't way more than any fan. Doubt Smith is kicking their butts twice a week in practice and still can't get minutes. If Collins is kicking Vucevic's butt right now, he may get to start, imo. Seems like with Donovan, you have to earn minutes, unless he has no choice, like with Pat Will.

[GoBlue72391]

He's the textbook definition of a league average head coach.

I have some quibbles with some of his rotations and whatnot, but he's fine here until we get to the point where we're actually making some noise, at which point we'll need to look elsewhere for a coach that can get us over the hump. But there's so many things that need to happen before we even get to thst point that it's not worth worrying about now.

I'm mostly indifferent on him and he's way down my list of issues with this organization.

[Infinity2152]

We were supposed to suck after the Lavine trade, lmao! Everybody predicted it. Should have been one of the worst teams in the league. I'm not a tanking fan, but for those that are, I'm sure you feel we could have won far fewer games the last few years but somehow we stay near .500.

I wonder what record he would have had to coach this team of misfits to in order to be considered a good coach? Because in the end, wins are what really matter, not how you got there. His methods kept us at .500 with no defensive players and no 1A.

Players appear to like playing for him too. Thibs would have had the whole team injured and broken, with maybe a few more wins, maybe not.

[ChettheJet]

The same people who harp on how the Bulls don't have superstar players that they need to win, are the ones who are hardest on Donovan. They're the same people who rush to calk the owners cheap, say AKME know less than they do about the NBA. They aren't Bulls fans they just like to bellyache online because being the know it all critic makes them imagine that they're the superstar nobody is looking for.

Billy does the best he can with the players he's presented with. He looks at a kid like Dalen Terry and he saw from the stat he needed to develop so instead of throwing him out there 30 MPG he got him minutes, made him practice, had him work on things. Terry is as good as he's going to get. He rested Lonzo Ball rather than have him play and maybe help win three more games. He held back Alex Caruso so he'd have a few less floor burns and play a few more games. He knew DeRozan and Lavine didn't want to share the ball with very many teammates so he had to let them take ove instead of benching them.

A third of NBA coaching is X's and O's, another third is player management and the last third is ego for everyone from the owners, the front office, the coaches, the players, the staff. Billy seems to manage to keep enough of a balance that all the Joe Cowley articles look like nothing to pay attention to.

[Red Larrivee]

I've yet to see a team in OKC or Chicago that he coached that should have done more than what they actually did. However, I've seen multiple teams that he coached in OKC and Chicago that did more than what they were expected to do.

He's highly respected in the NBA and in NCAA. Him and AK have been consistently aligned. Ownership likes him. He's never lost the locker room in 5 seasons, which is tough to do these days. He's also not holding back any player from success. You can criticize or nitpick pick play designs, rotations, and in-game adjustments of any coach in the league, so that doesn't matter much to me. People have done it with every coach here.

If I had my choice of any coach in the league, I wouldn't pick him. But, he's fine, stable and far down the list of Bulls issues. I tend to think the Bulls would struggle attracting a better coach without making the check fatter.

[meekrab]

Are people in here actually hard on BD? I think we all agree he's a solid coach, no?

He had some extremely obvious faults like never using his **** challenges even when it was obviously a blown call. Has gotten somewhat better at this one, but he still had 36 total challenges last year; meanwhile the Suns had 36 unsuccessful challenges, and the Thunder had 35. OKC literally challenged more than double the number of calls Billy did. AKME have got to lean on him to be more liberal with this.
https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/nba-coaches-challenges-teams-ranked-strategy-behind-when-use-them/06bae6251ed0634eda184254

He over relies on Vuc who should've been down in the 25-28 minutes a game range years ago. Sure, for a while the only backups were stone handed bums but we have two guys with legit NBA talent now and they hardly see the floor.

Massive entitlement minutes for PWill from the get-go were obviously a mistake and resulted in us signing him to a hilariously undeserved contract simply because he played a lot.

[Infinity2152]

Great to hear everybody's positions. Lot of great points. Don't think he's the best coach in the league, but how could we know, lol? Love all our guys, but this roster has been incredibly flawed, like seriously top 3-4 players below average to bad defensively is crazy. The best player's main identifier "Doesn't contribute to wins"!

I'm on the positive side. Of course, I'll disagree with some of his lineup adjustments and substitutions, like anybody else. Some more than others. His plan is different than my plan, all I can judge by is his results. His lineups and adjustments lead to 40 wins with these guys.

If you keep a below average team at or above average for years in a very tough league, then add in every Bulls player seems to want to be here (except maybe Pat and Smith ) by my standards I'd call you a good coach. Teams better than ours have guys ready to flee at any minute.

[dougthonus]

I think Donovan has a pretty good reputation relative to his record. Most coaches with his results would be thought of much worse than he is.

I think that's also fair based on the context.

[kulaz3000]

I think Donovan has a pretty good reputation relative to his record. Most coaches with his results would be thought of much worse than he is.

I think that's also fair based on the context.

Just based on the part I've bolded, most competent front offices would have definitely fired him by now, that's for certain. But I think our front office is very well aware the fault of the roster is on them, and not the coach, which is why they've kept him as long as they have. They basically can't afford to use him as a scapegoat.

[League Circles]

I think Billy is solid because I think the most important part of NBA coaching is to keep a positive team vibe among the player egos. I think he's excellent at that. Most locker rooms would have imploded with the level of mediocrity we've had for this long.

I don't think he's good at rotations, which sucks. Xs and Os I'm not sure I have a strong opinion. My biggest concern about Billy is that he might have been a major contributing voice in our poor roster construction over the last 4 years.

[Hangtime84]

Last time he had a really good roster he almost beat the a prime warriors team in his first year.

Maximized a few of players over the years Russ, PG13 and lastly DeMar into MVP contender or winning players.

Not sure what to make of it, but AK and Billy learned from their mistakes we will see how the roster looks 2 years from now.