The Chicago Bulls saw their season end last night in the United Center at the hands of Tyler Herro's 38-point outburst. His incredible offensive performance represents the fourth-highest scoring game in Play-In Tournament history. The Miami Heat will advance to face the Atlanta Hawks on Friday night for the last slot in the NBA Playoffs, where the victor will meet the Cleveland Cavaliers in first-round action. Meanwhile, Miami sends the Chicago Bulls home for the third consecutive season during the mini-tournament. Now that the offseason is officially here, there's plenty of speculation about where the Bulls go. Josh Giddey is a restricted free agent, Billy Donovan and Arturas Karnisovas maintain their incredibly baffling job security, and they own the rights to their own first-round draft selection. This is what the biggest splash this offseason will be.
Billy Donovan Will Be Fired
One move that the Bulls will almost certainly make either this summer or mid-season in 2025/26 is dismissing head coach Billy Donovan. While the last 20 games showed that he's truly a talented coach who deserves to be at the helm of an NBA franchise, last night's lack of competition and game plan execution was the final straw. The Bulls never led during their 19-point loss at home against a team they'd been 3-0 against over the past three months. Despite watching Herro drop 30 points in their last matchup of the regular season, Donovan refused to start a defensive-stopping guard to solely focus on dampening their top-scoring threat. It burned them from the opening tip-off.
.@LaurenceWHolmes on Bulls' 109-90 loss to Heat: "You know that I love Billy (Donovan). Billy got pantsed last night. He didn't get his guys to do what they were supposed to do. (Erik) Spoelstra got his guys to do what they were supposed to do."
— 670 The Score (@670TheScore) April 17, 2025
Listen: https://t.co/hXv9FRT4Gh pic.twitter.com/IH2F6abXLh
Yes, Donovan outperformed expectations by the most significant margin he has during his entire tenure with the franchise, and yes, he's still proving that the previous five years of failure were not his doing. Still, the mediocrity has to fall on someone's shoulders at some point. With DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine already gone, he's one of the last remaining dominoes to fall from the original disastrous group that started the endless disappointment.
Body Of Work Is Embarrassingly Bad
Most Bulls fans agree that the problem is within the trio of Arturas Karnisovas, Zach LaVine, and Billy Donovan. Where the disagreements begin is trying to rank the three in order of detrimental impact on the organization. While many will initially debate that LaVine was the most significant issue and his contract set the franchise back several years, Karnisovas must be held equally responsible for inking that and other terrible agreements. With LaVine already out the door and Karnisovas's contract beyond the next few years, there's nowhere else to turn except their head coach. Looking purely at numbers, although he's been dealt one of the worst hands leaguewide from a coaching perspective, it's hard to make the case that he deserves to stick around.
Billy Donovan was hired in 2020
— Ahmed/The Ears/IG: BigBizTheGod 🇸🇴 (@big_business_) April 17, 2025
His overall record with the Chicago Bulls is 191-204 and 19-27 in the playoffs
Coaches are getting fired with better records and got championships rings, his job security will be studied for generations to come.
As noted above, finding another head coach with as low a standing as Donovan who still has a job would not be easy. The latest and most extreme example would be Denver's Michael Malone, who was fired last week despite having coached the All-Star game twice in the previous five years and won an NBA title just two seasons prior.
Will Chicago make Donovan their latest scapegoat to cover for Karnisovas and his awful job at the forefront, or will he survive another underwhelming season in the Windy City?
