Chicago Bulls: Who is “Billy the Kid?”

Who is the new Chicago Bulls head coach?

The Chicago Bulls have had a wild offseason full of wholesale changes to the team’s leadership. It started with the hiring of executive vice president  Arturas Karnisovas, continued with new general manager Marc Eversley, and was finalized this week with the addition of Billy “the Kid” Donovan as the team’s new head coach.

Full disclosure, I am a proud member of the “Friar Faithful” and supporter of Providence College, the alma mater of the Bulls’ new head man. While most fans know Donovan as the coach who turned around the University of Flordia basketball program, or most recently, the Oklahoma City Thunder head coach, as a PC fan, I will always know him as Billy the Kid.

So who is Billy the Kid? Well, for starters, he is someone who Rick Pitino (the Providence head coach at the time) had hoped would transfer from the small catholic college in Rhode Island with a proud basketball history.

After disappointing freshman and sophomore years, Donovan appeared overmatched in the vaunted Big East conference and wanted to transfer. However, Pitino couldn’t even give him away to either Fairfield or Northeastern, Donovan’s top two choices, and he was forced to stay at PC. As luck would have it, it was the best thing to happen to Donovan and was likely the turning point in his career.

Stuck with Donovan, Pitino implored him to drop more than 30 pounds over the summer and come back for his junior year at 160 pounds to play the more uptempo style Pitino wanted to play. As Pitino would later say about Donovan’s physical transformation, “I’ve never had in my life anyone work as hard to improve as him, in 35 years.”

That singular line is why Bulls fans should be incredibly excited to have Donovan leading their team. However, he’s not just a hard worker and a prototypical underdog story. He’s also an incredibly accomplished coach. After two championships (thanks to his relentless recruiting and coaching) and perennially being at the top of the SEC, it’s easy to forget how bad the University of Florida’s basketball program was before he arrived.

It may also be easy to lose sight of all of the players he developed at Florida, who are now (or were) accomplished players in the NBA: Joakim Noah, Bradley Beal, Udonis Haslem, Al Horford, Corey Brewer, Mike Miller, David Lee, and Chandler Parsons.

But no one should ever lose sight of where his remarkable career began, and where he began to cultivate his grit and have the experiences that would ultimately shape his coaching style. It was at Providence College where a lightly recruited kid from the northeast took the college world by storm for a month in 1987 when he led the Friars on an improbable run to the Final Four, and where Billy the Kid became Billy the Man.