Chicago Bulls: 3 best HC candidates passed up for Billy Donovan

1) Candidates Chicago Bulls passed on to hire Billy Donovan: Ime Udoka

Among the current NBA assistant coaches that the Bulls were considering for their next head coaching hire, there wasn’t much better that it got than the Philadelphia 76ers lead assistant Ime Udoka. If he manages to continue his successful run on staff with the Sixers (who are also without a head coach at the moment), then it won’t be long at all before Udoka gets a HC job himself.

There was that connection for the Bulls between recently hired general manager and former Sixers senior vice president of player personnel Marc Eversley with Udoka. Those two were on the Sixers payroll together for quite a while. And with Eversley replacing Gar Forman as the Bulls next GM, it made sense that he was one of the top coaching candidates to replace Boylen.

Udoka might be a candidate to land the Sixers head coach job opening, since former HC Brett Brown departed earlier this year. The Sixers certainly had a disappointing finish to the season after the injury to young star point guard Ben Simmons. The six-seed Sixers were swept in the first round of the playoffs by the three-seed Celtics.

The problem with the Bulls hiring Udoka would’ve been the dice roll of having no head coaching experience to back his resume. While candidates like Donovan, Rivers, D’Antoni, and even Brown and former Indiana Pacers head coach Nate McMillan, are all proven winners, Udoka would be a bigger gamble if the Bulls had hired him.