Billy Donovan Hops Onto The NBA’s Slow-Moving Coaching Carousel

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?