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Billy Donovan takes over as Spurs' new assistant in surprising hire Weeks after a historic NBA Finals collapse, the Spurs answer with a stunner: Hall of Fame head coach Billy Donovan joining their bench.
Finals behind one of the most exciting young cores in the NBA, led by Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper.
Wembanyama is a generational superstar that just won the Western Conference Finals MVP.
Castle was the 2025 Rookie of the Year.
And Harper earned a spot on the All-Rookie First Team this past season.
And they're all under 23 years old.
This isn't a team that's going anywhere.And now, they just added one of the greatest minds in basketball to the mix.
On Thursday, ESPN's Shams Charania reported that the Spurs have reached an agreement to make Billy Donovan the new lead assistant in San Antonio under head coach Mitch Johnson.
While the Spurs' season was largely a success, they also had one of the most brutal collapses in NBA Finals history.San Antonio blew a 29-point lead in Game 4 and gave away a late edge in Game 5, losing both games, the latter at home, to let the Knicks walk out of Frost Bank Center as champions.
Maybe Donovan can help get them over that hump.
Donovan is already a Hall of Fame coach, inducted in 2025, who won back-to-back national championships at Florida in 2006 and 2007 before jumping to the NBA.He first landed in Oklahoma City in 2015, guiding the Thunder to 55 wins and the Western Conference finals in his first year.
He coached just five seasons there but never had a losing record.Then he took over the Chicago Bulls in 2020, spending the last six seasons on that bench.
In that stretch, he led the Bulls to the playoffs just once, in 2021-22, and finished with a 226-256 overall record.
But what's surprising about this hire isn't just that a longtime head coach is moving into an assistant role.
It's that Donovan was reportedly being floated for several other jobs in recent weeks, both in the NBA and college basketball.Most notably, he was one of the finalists for the Orlando Magic's head coaching vacancy, a job that ultimately went to the very man whose seat Donovan is now filling in San Antonio.
Weeks before the Finals even tipped off, Spurs associate head coach Sean Sweeney had already agreed to leave for Orlando, removing the defensive mind who helped Wemby capture the league's Defensive Player of the Year award.Sweeney stuck around to finish the postseason run with San Antonio, but once the Spurs' Finals loss wrapped up, the seat next to Johnson was officially open.
At 61, Donovan already has titles on the shelf at the college level and a Hall of Fame plaque secured.
The only thing he doesn't have yet is an NBA championship, and he just landed with the team best positioned to get one next year.