Chicago Bulls: Zach LaVine and Billy Donovan are ready to work together

The Chicago Bulls hired Billy Donovan as their new head coach earlier this week, and nobody should be happier than Zach LaVine.

The Chicago Bulls finally pulled the plug on an awful coach in an awful situation when they fired Jim Boylen just over a month ago. Overmatched from the start, he’s one of the few coaches in the modern era to inspire a near-mutiny that came so close to occurring that it was public knowledge.

On Tuesday, the Bulls found their replacement in ex-OKC Thunder coach Billy Donovan. While it’s not necessarily a match made in heaven, considering Donovan willingly left one rebuilding situation for another rebuild, it’s going to be nothing short of a career-rejuvenation for the Bulls’ best player; Zach LaVine.

It’s no secret that while Boylen grated on all his players, he grated on LaVine most of all. Even when Boylen did right, he couldn’t help but screw things up like when LaVine paid a fine for one of Boylen’s technical fouls, but then Boylen leaked that to the media and enraged his young star.

In firing Boylen, new executive vice president Arturas Karnisovas made his first significant mark on the franchise, even if it was a move that lacked courage and creativity on its face. Almost any move is an improvement on the embattled former coach, and Billy Donovan will surely work out fine at worst as head coach of the Chicago Bulls.

For Zach LaVine in particular, though, it’s important that the star/coach relationship is able to function on a high level. The coaching he’s received in his young career has been often suspect and never comprehensive. The only reasonable NBA coach he’s played for was Tom Thibodeau, and that was a brief stint early in his career and Thibodeau is not known as a developmentally-focused coach, or one that has much time for young players.

LaVine expressed some pleasure when he heard that he had a new head coach, and one who was actually competent at an NBA level.

At the time, he was playing Call of Duty’s Warzone Battle Royale, and he took a moment from running around with an entirely non-meta AUG SMG (the man dropped a RAM-7 for it, which is shocking and disappointing) to say: “Ah damn we got Billy Donovan as our next coach. Wow. That’ll be good. Billy Donovan was a good coach at OKC, used to coach at Florida. Really good coach.”

Here’s the video if you want to watch a man drop a RAM-7 for an AUG:

While we’re entirely disappointed in the ground loot he prefers, we will note that Donovan appears to be a coach who already holds LaVine’s respect. In the NBA, that goes a long way towards forming a functional synergy between coach and player.

There will surely be some trials and tribulations along the way, but for now, Billy Donovan is a massive breath of fresh air for Zach LaVine and should be for the rest of the young players on the Chicago Bulls roster as well.