According to a tweet from Kevin Brockway, Oklahoma City Thunder head coach Billy Donovan would prefer to stay in the NBA.
Brockway, currently a Big Ten reporter for CNHI Sports Indiana (Twitter handle: @KevinBrockwayG1) who was the Florida men’s basketball beat writer for the Gainesville Sun during most of Donovan’s tenure, chimed in on Donovan’s situation today.
When John Beilein accepted the head-coaching job with the Cleveland Cavaliers this morning, speculation about his replacement in Ann Arbor quickly focused in on the former UF coach.
Donovan remains OKC’s head coach with one year left on his contract. There’s no guarantee that Donovan or GM Sam Presti will be retained. If they are brought back, both would go into next season on a serious hot seat.
Here is Brockway’s tweet below:
My sources tell me that Billy D does not want to go back to college if he doesn’t have to. Enjoys the fact that the NBA is “all basketball.” No recruiting or dealing with other alumni functions.— KevinBrockwayCNHIIndiana (@KevinBrockwayG1) May 13, 2019
It makes sense. Donovan, a gym rat, was always attracted to the fact that NBA coaches can focus on 100-percent basketball before leaving the Gators, who he led to back-to-back national championships in 2006 and 2007.
Other potential candidates at Michigan could be Northwestern’s Chris Collins, Butler’s LaVall Jordan, Arizona State’s Bobby Hurley, Notre Dame’s Mike Brey, Loyola-Chicago’s Porter Moser and Miami Heat assistant Juwan Howard.
Moser and Hurley both turned down overtures from St. John’s a couple of weeks ago. Jordan played at Butler, but he was a Beilein assistant at Michigan from 2010-2016. Howard doesn’t have any head-coaching experience, but he was a member of the famed Fab Five in the early 1990s.