NEW YORK — Billy Donovan doesn’t have the answers. The Chicago Bulls coach keeps using the word “unprecedented” to describe the Bulls. He’s not wrong. Monday’s game against the Brooklyn Nets featured only three players who had been rostered by the Bulls one week prior. This is a team cur rently surviving on placeholders and icebreakers as they attempt to form chemistry on the spot. The Bulls haven’t won a game since January. This isn’t working. Donovan isn’t sure if it ever will. But for the next 28 games, it’s his job to mold this motley assembly of cast-offs into something resembling a team. “We’re not going to be a finished product,” Donovan said. “It’s not going to work like that. And we’ll see if we can ever get there.” Executive vice president of basketball operations Artūras Karnišovas still won’t use the word rebuild, but Donovan knows the Bulls are embracing significant change in an effort to build a better roster. As the Bulls reshape their identity, the coach is a crucial centerpiece for the future. But does Donovan even want a part in the messy process of building a roster from scratch? Donovan hasn’t always been a favorite among Bulls fans. His tenure has been riddled by mediocrity at best. Those records are only going to get worse with time as the team tumbles toward the draft lottery. At the same time, his expertise and aptitude have often elevated the Bulls slightly above expectation for their relatively modest rosters — and guided the development of players like Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu along the way. Chicago Bulls guard Collin Sexton and Bulls head coach Billy Donovan talk in the first half of a game against the Denver Nuggets at the United Center in Chicago on Feb. 7, 2026. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune) The Bulls extended Donovan’s contract last summer. The front office values the coach as a central asset of its future plans. Still, there’s a chance any time a front office asks a Hall of Famer to gut out a rebuild that his answer will simply be “no.” When Donovan left the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2020, the prevailing belief was that the coach couldn’t buy into the idea of a long-term rebuild. This has always been a slightly overblown construct — Donovan had been hitting a wall in the playoffs and the Thunder were growing restless for new coaching options — but storylines are hard to shake in the NBA. Nearly six years later, Donovan still refuses to feed into this narrative surrounding his exit from Oklahoma City and his expectations in Chicago. On the day of the trade deadline, for instance, Donovan argued that he spent the majority of his storied collegiate career rebuilding rosters. But there is no mechanism in the NCAA that rewards a program for years of suffering by offering an improved shot at top prospects. The two situations aren’t comparable, which makes Donovan’s outlook on the future in Chicago more difficult to discern. That’s true even for Donovan, who voiced his own uncertainty about the path being charted by Karnišovas. “I think we’ve got to sit down as an organization, quite honestly — myself, ownership, the front office — and just find the direction and the clarity,” Donovan said before last Thursday’s game against Toronto. Donovan understands the importance of building a roster the right way. The Bulls failed in their attempt to construct a team around veterans through free agency and trades, briefly showing flashes of promise in the 2021-22 season before crashing back to earth. It makes sense to try a different approach, particularly in the face of high-level draft classes such as the 2026 prospects. Like many others around the NBA, Donovan pointed to Detroit — a team that went from a 14-68 record in 2024 to the top of the Eastern Conference this year — as an example of how quickly a rebuild designed around top-level draft picks can snap into place. “The NBA is getting younger,” Donovan said. “There’s a lot of younger people coming in. The speed and the pace of the game has changed. A lot of teams are getting younger.” Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan looks on from the bench in the second half of a game against the Brooklyn Nets at the United Center in Chicago on Dec. 3, 2025. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune) And it’s not that Donovan doesn’t want to work with young players. The coach cherishes the relationships he built with Bulls draftees over the years. He derives great personal pride in the growth made by players like White and Dosunmu. He remembers how the belief and care of coaches like Rick Pitino changed his life as a young athlete. Providing that same support system to Bulls youngsters like Matas Buzelis still brings Donovan immense joy. For a coach with a 195-205 record in Chicago, the improvements made by these young players serve as the top highlights for Donovan’s tenure with the Bulls. 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The coach doesn’t believe that players can truly develop without being surrounded by a holistic system that encourages their growth. He emphasized the importance of role clarity, which gives a player specificity in their development needs. And ultimately, Donovan doesn’t feel the Bulls can successfully rebuild if they don’t identify the right type of player cut out to weather several hard seasons while still improving individually. Without the correct attributes — competitiveness, mindset, IQ, internal drive — Donovan fears a young player could flounder in Chicago. “The development piece is really a partnership,” Donovan said. “I don’t think Coby and Ayo would have made the steps and the growth and had the development that they had if it was not for the fact that both of those guys were incredibly driven, motivated and total team guys. If you get a young player that doesn’t have that mentality, it’s really, really hard to develop a guy.” Ultimately, this is a question for the future. Donovan won’t have an answer until the summer. Right now, he only has room in his brain for the present — how to play through a frontcourt with only one healthy center, how to manage a clustered group of increasingly undersized guards, how to still keep Buzelis on track while the season falls apart around him. But what the coach decides will shape the team’s long-term plans. A rebuild is happening, with or without Donovan. How that manifests will be decided by how much work — and losing — he can stomach over the coming years in Chicago. ...read more read less