Fred Hoiberg to Bulls not a sign of trouble for college basketball
Until they changed jobs this spring, Billy Donovan and Fred Hoiberg were in the top 13% of winningest active coaches in college basketball. Among those 50 and under, you'd be hard pressed to find a better résumé than Donovan's or a hotter name than Hoiberg's.
Donovan's back-to-back championships at Florida speak for themselves, as does his career .709 winning percentage. Hoiberg's track record is significantly shorter, but in just five seasons he turned a program that had reached the NCAA tournament just once in the previous eight years into a four-time tournament team
But should Donovan's and Hoiberg's respective moves to the Oklahoma City Thunder and Chicago Bulls cause concern that college basketball is suffering a brain drain? Or are they just a pair of unique situations and ideal fits which happened to fall within weeks of another?
Correlation does not always mean causation; the NBA isn't just hiring college coaches on a whim. Donovan and Hoiberg were chosen by very specific organizations for very specific reasons.
Donovan is a future Hall of Famer, a down-to-earth, good Xs and Os coach who is expected to take a star-laden roster and compete for NBA championships immediately.
"It had to be a special situation for Billy," Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley told Paste BN Sports.
"He's had plenty of opportunities, so it wasn't, 'I'm going to be a successful college coach who's going to cross over.' I just think Oklahoma City presented a cultural thing to him. Time will tell. A lot of college coaches have gone up there and have not been successful. … Billy, obviously, we all want him to have great success. I want him to be the next Phil Jackson, Red Auerbach. I want Billy to win every game. But if he doesn't, he'll be back in college. That's kind of what's happened — Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Mike Montgomery, Lon Kruger."
Chicago's hire was perhaps even more telegraphed — or pre-ordained — than Oklahoma City's.
Hoiberg played for the Bulls from 1999 to 2003, part of his 10-year playing career in the league, after which time he worked as a coach and in the front office for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Hoiberg's new boss will be general manager Gar Forman, who coached Hoiberg at Iowa State as an assistant. Hoiberg, like Donovan, inherits a roster of talented playmakers poised to contend for championships right away. It wasn't said enough of Hoiberg's time at Iowa State, but his use of junior college transfers — plugging holes, filling roles — was akin to what NBA teams do in free agency.
"He's always said from Day 1 that his lifelong goal has been to coach in the NBA," Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard said last month. "It's for him to decide when that part of his life he wants to activate."
The time is now, apparently.
There were no illusions about Hoiberg's eventual return to the NBA, just as there was no true surprise that Donovan might jump to the league, too; his former assistants said he'd always dreamed about coaching there, and he'd had his infamous week-long stint as the coach of the Orlando Magic in 2007.
So while these departures are wrenching for both the Iowa State and Florida fan bases and do rob college basketball of two excellent coaches, they do not seem to embody some sport universe-altering trend.
They're just two guys who faced two great opportunities and couldn't say no.
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