Billy Donovan seemed all set to become the dominant figure in the Chicago Bulls’ basketball hierarchy, having not only outlasted the team’s head of basketball operations and its general manager but getting an oversold but still noticeable vote of approval from the person who just fired them. Those two ex-executives were Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley, and the instrument of their pink slips was Michael Reinsdorf, son of the owner and the current president and CEO. When Reinsdorf said, “If I interview someone and they’re not sold on Billy, they’re not sold on a Hall of Fame coach,” he was crowning the team’s new sub-boss.
And so when Reinsdorf said, “If Billy wants to be our coach and someone’s not interested in that, then they’re probably not the right candidate for us,” nobody took the alternate reality in the first part seriously. The Bulls are the Bulls, and that means a decade of torpid mediocrity, with minimal postseason participation (two series, both lost) and an average winning percentage of .426, the equivalent of a 35-47 record. Still, an NBA head coaching job is an NBA head coaching job, and security in an insecure structure is not to be scoffed at.
And yet Donovan scoffed it away barely two weeks later, saying he was done with the Bulls of his own volition rather than take his chances with a new boss. The decision feels like the choice of someone who sees only a cul de sac where Reinsdorf wants to see open highway, but you go with what you know. Where Donovan ends up will be the subject of its own rounds of speculation, but one job rises above all the others as a point of conjecture, and what is American sports more than people who don’t know things guessing at the futures of those who do?
That job, amazingly, is the head coaching gig for the Golden State Warriors, which until last weekend was perceived to be one of the most secure jobs in sports. Steve Kerr confessed on Friday night to Stephen Curry and Draymond Green, his longest running compatriots, that he didn’t know what awaited him in the job he has held with considerable distinction and some late-stage carping for the past 12 years. In doing so, he broke open one of the tightest seals in the sport. It had always been assumed that Kerr would go only when he was ready, and that may still be true, but his choice to offer this up in a forum that allowed the possibility to be overheard and freely speculated about makes this The Most Intriguing Opening, Maybe.
But let’s assume the “maybe” to be evidence, just for S&G. Could that job end up being Donovan’s? There are too many moving parts, not enough speculatable vacancies, and almost no time has elapsed to see his vision, but what else have you got going today? His name had been most persistently linked to the job at North Carolina that was vacated by the firing of Hubert Davis, but coaching college basketball or football is now a fundraiser’s nightmare and an in-game strategist’s nightmare, and veterans of the craft seem to hate it more than ever before. Anyway, Michael Malone took that one, so maybe college is the new NBA after all.
You will notice at this point that some form of the word “speculation” has been used three times in five paragraphs, which means that this story is already sailing close to the prevailing off-season wind of gasbagging bullshit. But Donovan’s resignation came in the face of his seeming political triumph in Chicago, and Kerr’s hesitation to fully embrace the future in the place where his Hall of Fame past unfolded makes this a quickly self-assembling and shape-shifting Venn diagram of WTF. In other words, “La victoire est à nous!”
This feels at first glance like the motherlode of off-season fantasy building, in two of the nation’s largest markets. The only other open saddles on the coaching carousel are in Milwaukee (Doc Rivers, RIP) and New Orleans (where interim coach James Borrego is a candidate for the full-time gig vacated by Willie Green in mid-November). As it is, this could be the quietest coaching job fair since 2017, when nobody lost their job in what we are now calling The Year All The Owners Forgot They Owned Their Teams. The year before that, there were 12 firings in what we are now calling The Year All The Owners Were Pissed Off Simultaneously. Normally the average number of firings is around nine, and there is still time for first round playoff losers to get the cardboard box. (We’re looking at you, Jamahl Mosely; don’t get giddy, Tiago Splitter.)
Whether it’s Donovan or someone else, the Warriors are suddenly the most intriguing vacancy-ette, and until Kerr decides he doesn’t want to do this any more, or if Joe Lacob decides that Kerr doesn’t want to do it any more, we won’t know what the alternative to Most Desired Job Vacancy would be. Based on Hawks 107, Knicks 106 on Monday night, it could be in New York, but that’s not the way to bet quite yet. And really, this wouldn’t be a notion worth entertaining at all were it not for Kerr, who might just walk away, and Donovan, who just did. After all, in a league where a third of the membership reads the standings backwards and pretends that’s worth a parade, the three worst teams by record, Sacramento, Utah, and Washington, have all announced that they are bringing back their coaches (combined winning percentage, .299) for another year or more.
All of which makes the next few weeks of the NBA a slightly spicier place, and the best part of that is that these two particular narratives might end up being spectacularly wrong. Maybe Donovan returns to some other college, or maybe he is coveted in another market, or maybe he goes fishing. Conversely, maybe Kerr just needs a week or two to relocate his car charger. But let’s be honest, we’re all just murdering time until the Sixers and Cheapjack Blazers are removed from our sight and business gets serious. If that means wondering what Billy Donovan and Steve Kerr are thinking, well, we did say WTF.
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