September 09, 2020
The Oklahoma City Thunder were one of the pleasant surprises of the 2019-20 NBA season, but the fond feelings are fading already. Following a first-round exit, the team has decided to part ways with head coach Billy Donovan, presumably kicking off a downturn/rebuilding period once the team moves on from veteran talent.
As it turns out, the Sixers have a head coach opening, a former player of Donovan's from his University of Florida days, and some early buzz about his candidacy for the job. Multiple reports, including name drops from Kevin O'Connor of The Ringer and Sam Amick of The Athletic, suggest he will be on Philadelphia's radar this offseason.
So who is he, what does he do, and is he a good fit? Let's discuss.
At the very least, Donovan has shrugged off the idea that he couldn't hack it as an NBA coach. Five years into his pro-level career after a terrific stint at Florida, Donovan has been a competent, if unspectacular NBA coach.
Earning praise this year for an Oklahoma City Thunder team that overachieved after trading away two stars, Donovan was finally able to implement an offensive scheme that resembled something closer to his Florida offense, utilizing a spread pick-and-roll style with multiple playmakers on the floor, boosted by Danillo Gallinari's shooting when teams collapsed on the paint. OKC was perhaps the league's best team in crunch time this season, thriving in close games and executing down the stretch as well as any team in the league.
You can't untangle that success from the presence of Chris Paul, one of the league's elite tacticians and leaders at the point guard position, though it was far from a given that OKC would absorb Paul and turn in the season they did. The Thunder were known to be cycling into a rebuilding (or at least re-tooling) period after trading Russell Westbrook and Paul George last season, but with Donovan watching over things, Paul and his OKC teammates surprised many in 2019-20.
Conceptually, Donovan is a coach who wants to mold his scheme to suit the players, as he told coaches during a virtual clinic this spring.
“A lot of times your personnel can change — whether it’s through graduation in high school and college, or whether it’s through different changes in the NBA — I think you’ve got to locate and figure out what each guy’s strengths and talents are," Donovan said, according to the Oklahoman. "And then, the job of the coach is to maximize those individual talents as best they can.”
(Whether that's actually something he achieved/sought to do at the NBA level is a different story, though it could be argued that Russell Westbrook's presence throughout his tenure was the biggest driver of their year-to-year style of play.)
Historically, Donovan has liked running a lot of sets out of "Horns" formations, dating back to a different era of basketball where the two-big frontcourt was still en vogue. That's useful experience for a team built clumsily around Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. With Simmons presumably getting more time and reps at forward in the years to come, sets that have him starting from the elbow will likely be a focal point for any Sixers offense.
It's not hard to envision how a Donovan-led team would use Simmons as a ball-screen weapon, provided they actually bring in some guards to initiate the offense. Combined with his experience nurturing two-big teams at the college level, it's not completely out of the question that he could find a way to make Philadelphia's overloaded frontcourt work.
If you were fed up with Brett Brown because of weird rotations, uninspiring schematic choices, and an inability to get through to star players, then boy, is Billy Donovan not the coach for you. You can make the case against him almost entirely using words from his own players, in fact.
Since joining the team prior to the 2015-16 season, Donovan has made it past the first round of the playoffs just one time, that first season where he had both Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook at his disposal. If not for LeBron James leading the famous 3-1 comeback over the Warriors in the Finals, that postseason would probably best be remembered for the Thunder blowing a 3-1 lead of their own and allowing Golden State to glide past them in the Conference Finals.
When Durant mistakenly revealed his love for burner accounts to the world in 2017, guess who was specifically namedropped in the tweets as a reason for him leaving Oklahoma City?
From a man-management perspective, the concern for many former college coaches transitioning to the pros is how they'll adjust from leading teenagers to grown men. The college coach is king, while the pro coach is working in a player-driven environment. Donovan adapted nicely, however, losing any authoritarian traits he might have used at the University of Florida.
Unfortunately, Donovan has a reputation for taking it a little too easy on his players. His own players said as much, and it was one of the reasons Donovan's job security was up in the air heading into this season.
Really interesting insight from Dennis Schröder about Billy Donovan. Talked about how much he likes Billy’s willingness to listen to players but says “when he listens too much to the players it can go bad.”
— Brett Dawson (@BDawsonWrites) April 25, 2019
Donovan was hired away from Florida in part because of his progressive, ball-moving offense at the college level, seen at the time of his hiring as the fix for a Thunder team that relied far too heavily on Durant, Westbrook, and James Harden to win isolation battles under Scott Brooks. Harden was long gone when he arrived, and Durant left after his first season, but up until the 2019-20 season, the same problems persisted in Oklahoma City, even when Westbrook was joined by a very different No. 2 in Paul George.
If there was a change in 2019-20, it was driven by an abundance of playmakers and primarily the presence of Chris Paul, who turned in another MVP-caliber campaign and dictated the tone and tempo of the offense as he has for every team he has ever played for. Maybe, if the Sixers manage to put together a good package for him, the Thunder can get Paul to come to Philly along with Donovan, but as currently constructed they do not have the means to play the sleek, spread-out style OKC played this past season.
Or perhaps they would, to the detriment of some of their players. One of the biggest criticisms of Brown while in charge of Philadelphia was his supposed inability to get the most out of players who looked much better elsewhere. I presume you've heard of Victor Oladipo, who immediately broke out as an All-Star after leaving Oklahoma City, where he was relegated to standing around and watching the Westbrook show instead of taking on secondary playmaking responsibilities. Hell, I assume you've heard of the other guy in that trade, Domantas Sabonis, who struggled mightily in his rookie year in OKC with Donovan asking him to step out and space the floor more than he was capable of.
(In fairness to Donovan, the 2019-20 season was a success for OKC in terms of maximizing talent. Dennis Schroder had the best year of his career as a bench weapon, and the Thunder got creative in dancing around shooting issues for some of their athletic wings. Players like Lu Dort, for example, were occasionally weaponized as screeners/mini rim-runners to combat sagging defenses and tap into their athleticism.)
And in case you missed the tightly-contested battle between OKC and Houston in round one, the Thunder watched their season end when Westbrook (now playing for the Rockets) blew up their plans for an inbound play not once but twice, and as Steven Adams inexplicably played down the stretch of a game where he looked completely out of place.
Is Donovan a bad coach? Absolutely not. Is he the guy you should bet on to command the locker room and push an ill-fitting roster to contention? The evidence says no.
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