Bulls want their next GM to keep Billy Donovan as coach, but history says that isn’t a great idea

The Chicago Bulls cleaned out their front office on Monday by firing top basketball executives Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley. Now, they begin the process of replacing them. The job holds real appeal. The Bulls could have two first-round picks in this year’s draft. They’ll have max cap space this offseason, they play in the NBA’s third-biggest market, and of course, they come with all of the history Michael Jordan made for them in the 1990s. On paper, it’s the sort of gig that should be able to attract top front office talent. There’s just one hangup: the Bulls seem to have their heart set on retaining head coach Billy Donovan.

“If I interview someone and they’re not sold on Billy, they’re not sold on a Hall of Fame coach,” Bulls CEO Michael Reinsdorf said during a video call Tuesday, “they’re not sold on a person who’s won championships in college, who’s gone deep in the playoffs with Oklahoma City. … If Billy wants to be our coach and someone’s not interested in that, then they’re probably not the right candidate for us.”

Though it hasn’t come with such public support from ownership, something similar appears to be happening in Dallas. The Mavericks are seeking a full-time replacement for Nico Harrison, and they’re even seemingly planning to go big-game hunting for proven, winning general managers in that effort. But according to Marc Stein, they’d also like whoever they hire to keep Jason Kidd as their head coach.

This has left fans of both teams feeling somewhat uneasy with their searches. Wouldn’t the best executives want to hire their own coach? Are the Bulls and Mavericks therefore limiting the pool of interested general managers by trying to handcuff them to an existing coach? Can an organization really be aligned when a head coach and general manager were hired by different people?

The theoretical answers to these questions are “yes,” “probably” and “usually not,” but why limit ourselves to conventional wisdom? Let’s look at NBA history and try to figure out whether or not teams tend to be more successful when general managers hire their own coaches or when they inherit them.

How did current NBA teams find their coaches?

The Bulls and Mavericks do not currently have general managers, so we’ll put them aside for the time being. That leaves 28 teams in the NBA that currently have front office leadership in place. Let’s talk about where the coaches they started this season came from.

Of those 28 teams, 20 followed the traditional path of hiring a general manager before their coach. Those teams are the Pistons, Celtics, Knicks, Cavaliers, 76ers, Hornets, Magic, Heat, Bucks, Nets, Pacers, Wizards, Thunder, Spurs, Lakers, Rockets, Clippers, Grizzlies and Jazz. 

You will notice right away that most of the NBA’s best teams occupy this list, including eight of the nine teams who have clinched playoff spots as of this writing. The timing of those partnerships varies wildly. Some general managers have been in their post for more than a decade and hired multiple coaches. On other occasions, the general manager and head coach were hired in the same offseason. Take Detroit as an example here. The Pistons hired Trajan Langdon one year in the historic six-year, $70 million deal they gave Monty Williams to be their head coach and they still allowed him to make a change. His subsequent hire of JB Bickerstaff has worked out quite well thus far.

So who are the other eight teams here? Let’s go through them one by one:

• The Timberwolves are the current league’s major success story on this front. Tim Connelly inherited Chris Finch from Gersson Rosas. However, it should be noted that Finch had been an assistant coach in Denver when Connelly was running the Nuggets, so there was at least a preexisting relationship between the two of them.
• The Nuggets replaced both their head coach and general manager last offseason. As David Adelman was promoted from his interim post, he was technically hired first, though as their two major hires were an internal promotion (Ben Tenzer) and the rehiring of an executive who followed Connelly to Minnesota (Jon Wallace), they likely had some inkling that the partnership could work.
• The Warriors promoted Mike Dunleavy Jr. to general manager internally and kept four-time champion Steve Kerr in place. Considering Dunleavy had been in the organization since 2018, there was already a working relationship.
• The Raptors promoted Bobby Webster internally, and he retained Darko Rajakovic. Again, they were leaning on a preexisting relationship.
• The Hawks technically promoted Onsi Saleh internally, but he had only been with the organization for one year, and he inherited a coach in Quin Snyder who was much more accomplished in his field. This seems a bit closer to the sort of “arranged marriage” fans are worried about here, but the duo has thus far seemingly worked together effectively.
• The Blazers promoted Joe Cronin internally soon after hiring Chauncey Billups as head coach, though the circumstances were unusual as Neil Olshey was fired soon after Billups was hired after an investigation found that he had created a toxic work environment. In this circumstance, Billups was so early into his contract that firing him just to give an internally promoted general manager the ability to hire a new coach would have been impractical. Still, Billups never made the playoffs as head coach of the Blazers. He was arrested after one game this season, and interim coach Tiago Splitter has the Blazers ready to compete in the Play-In Tournament.
• Joe Dumars inherited Willie Green, but fired him after a 2-10 start.
• Scott Perry inherited Doug Christie. The Kings went 107-88 in the previous two-and-a-half seasons under Mike Brown before Christie was promoted to his interim role, then went 27-24 with Christie in his first half-season as Sacramento’s interim. In his first season as the full-time head coach, however, the Kings are 21-58 despite seemingly planning to try to win this season.

Of these eight partnerships, only the one between Finch and Connelly has proven sustainably successful. The jury is still out on Denver, Toronto and Atlanta, but there is some degree of promise for each. Golden State’s circumstances aren’t really fair to judge. Kerr’s success with Bob Myers made him virtually untouchable and their aging roster has made it mostly impossible for Dunleavy to really put his stamp on the team. Billups and Cronin didn’t exactly fail, but they didn’t have any success, either. The Pelicans and Kings were outright disasters this season. Notably, the two were the runaway losers of my bi-annual front office rankings, coming in at No. 29 and No. 30, respectively. The Bulls were No. 28 and the Mavericks were No. 27.

We’re dealing with small samples here, though. There are only 30 head-coaching jobs. Most of them are hired by an existing general manager. It does seem notable, though, that the teams we associate with sustained winning (like the Thunder, Celtics, Spurs and Heat) never handcuffed a head coach to a general manager while the teams that are widely regarded as poorly-run (like the Kings, Pelicans and Bulls) went with the arranged marriage approach. Let’s not draw any conclusions yet, though. We need to broaden our horizons a bit.

What about non-current pairings?

Let’s wind the clocks back a decade. Since 2016, there have been a total of 43 instances in which a team has changed top basketball decision-makers, though this includes Brian Wright becoming San Antonio’s general manager while Gregg Popovich remained atop the organizational hierarchy as coach and team president. We will therefore ignore Wright inheriting Popovich. Otherwise, the split over this time period is much more balanced. There were 21 instances of a general manager inheriting a coach and keeping him going into his first full season on a job. So let’s look at how those partnerships played out:

• One-third of those 21 partnerships dissolved after the first year. Quin Snyder resigned from Danny Ainge’s Jazz and Mike Budenholzer left Travis Schlenk’s Hawks after their first years together. Landry Fields took over the Hawks in the middle of a season, kept Nate McMillan for the rest of that season and into the next but fired him before the end of that first full season. Michael Winger fired Wes Unseld Jr. after less than a year. After one full season, Steve Mills fired Jeff Hornacek, Jeff Weltman fired Frank Vogel and David Griffin fired Alvin Gentry.
• Jon Horst (Jason Kidd), Gersson Rosas (Ryan Saunders), Monte McNair (Luke Walton) and Koby Altman (Ty Lue) all fired coaches who predated them in their jobs during their second seasons together. Saunders was a complicated case. He was technically made the full-time head coach after Rosas was hired, and reporting stated that there was not a mandate from Minnesota owner Glen Taylor to hire him full time, but he was the interim coach before Rosas got the job and he was known to have support as the son of beloved former Wolves coach Flip Saunders, so we’re counting him.
• Bryan Colangelo was fired after two years as general manager of the 76ers due to a social media scandal, which abruptly ended his partnership with Brett Brown. Elton Brand took Colangelo’s job and fired Brown after two seasons. He was technically still the general manager when Doc Rivers was hired as Brown’s replacement, but soon after, Daryl Morey was hired on top of Brand.
• Scott Brooks parted ways with the Wizards two years after getting partnered with Tommy Sheppard. Magic Johnson was hired midway through Luke Walton’s first season with the Lakers, so technically he left the Lakers after two-and-a-half seasons together, though Johnson notably resigned from his post before axing Walton (though not for lack of trying).

We’re 15 duos through our list of 21 and thus far, nobody has lasted even three full years. That would broadly qualify the next six situations as the “successes” of this organization-building style, though I would argue that even if some came with meaningful winning, none of the six worked out in the end.

• Dwane Casey went 60-186 in three years with Troy Weaver.
• Doc Rivers had two separate three-year arranged marriages in this window. The first was with Lawrence Frank on the Clippers, with Frank actually replacing Rivers as head of basketball operations, and the second was with Daryl Morey and the 76ers, with Rivers getting hired around a month before Morey. Both of these teams had championship expectations under Rivers. Both fell short due to playoff collapses. Rivers infamously blew a 3-1 lead for the Clippers in the 2020 Orlando bubble against the Denver Nuggets, and then a 3-2 lead for the 76ers against the Celtics in the second round of the 2023 playoffs.
• Nate McMillan went 141-96 in three years working with Kevin Pritchard. The Pacers lost in the first round of all three postseasons, but expectations were never higher than that given the rosters McMillan had to work with.
• Jason Kidd and Nico Harrison were technically hired on the same day, with owner Mark Cuban spearheading both searches. Their partnership was successful for a time, with Dallas even reaching the 2024 NBA Finals. And then, well, we know what happened. Harrison traded Luka Dončić midway through his fourth season on the job and was fired early in his fifth. The extent of Kidd’s involvement in the trade is still disputed to this day, but neither looks great for the duo. Either the head coach and general manager were so unaligned that the general manager could make one of the worst trades in NBA history without feeling the need to consult his head coach or the two of them together conspired to make that historically awful deal. Either way, with hindsight, this partnership doesn’t look great.
• The theoretical gold standard here would be Calvin Booth and Michael Malone. The two won a championship together in their very first season together. Their working relationship grew so toxic that within two years, both were fired. Even after winning a title, this dynamic very nearly broke the Nuggets organization.

So with a decade of history now examined, the picture looks a lot clearer.

What can we take away from all of this?

Is it possible to win when your general manager didn’t get to hire his own coach? Yes. There are examples of winning teams getting built that way. Malone’s Nuggets, Kidd’s Mavericks and those Rivers teams are the best examples of that. But when a team is hiring a front office, they may envision the success that those teams had, but not the dysfunction and disappointment that came with it. When an owner hires a lead basketball executive, he usually does so hoping for organizational harmony, that he can have trustworthy leadership in place for the long haul.

And there just aren’t many examples of that happening in recent history. Even if you expand our time horizon a bit, you can see a handful of similar cases. Dwane Casey (with the Raptors), George Karl, Mike Brown (with the Cavaliers), Byron Scott and Sam Mitchell all won Coach of the Year awards within the past 20 seasons while working for general managers who didn’t hire them, but none of those unions yielded championships and eventually ended badly. Notably, the Raptors won a championship immediately after replacing Casey with a coach Masai Ujiri hired himself, Nick Nurse.

None of this is to suggest that the traditional way is infallible, either. Owners sometimes hire the wrong general managers, which ruins the coaching hire before the interviews even begin. The right general manager can hire the wrong coach. The right general manager’s wishes can be superseded by a meddling owner. There are countless ways any organizational structure can go wrong.

But think about what Reinsdorf said he wants for Chicago’s future. “We want to win, but we don’t want to win if it’s not sustainable,” Reinsdorf said. “I don’t want to be just good for one or two years. I want it to be year in, year out, we have a chance to be competitive and win. And maybe some of those years, we can go all the way.”

Think about the ways that the NBA’s actual, sustained winners operate. Can you imagine Micky Arison telling Pat Riley who should coach his team? Or Clay Bennett interfering with Sam Presti’s long-term designs? Peter Holt was well-known for trusting Gregg Popovich to do his job. The Celtics have new ownership now, but Wyc Grousbeck was never known for issuing mandates to Danny Ainge or Brad Stevens.

If recent NBA history is any indication, the key to building a sustainable winner is finding an executive you trust and getting out of their way. This is in no way a critique of Donovan (or Kidd for that matter). Plenty of the coaches we’ve covered here succeeded in other jobs or even the ones that didn’t work out in the way. But the healthiest organizations are run from the top down by a single executive with the authority to do whatever it takes to put a winning team on the floor. If the Bulls are serious about sustained winning, finding that executive and granting him the authority he needs to build the organization he wants is where they have to start.