Billy Donovan

Billy Donovan
William John Donovan, Jr.is an American professional basketball coach who is currently the head coach of the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association. He previously spent 19 seasons at the University of Florida, where his Florida Gators men's basketball teams won two NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships in 2006 and 2007. Donovan has more wins than any other coach in the history of the Florida basketball program, and he coached the Gators to more NCAA tournament appearances,...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth30 May 1965
CityRockville Centre, NY
I've often said the greatest equalizer in college basketball is the 3-point line. They outscored us by 12 from the 3-point line. Our inability to limit them to one shot and inability to guard the 3-point line cost us. Anytime a team can come into your building and shoot 53 percent from the field and 47 percent from the 3-point line, you have to have a very, very good night on offense.
Corey had a very good game shooting the basketball.
Get out there and make him a driver, let's see how many times he can finish going to the basket. We allowed him to do what he does well, and that's shoot the basketball.
Obviously as a freshman, without question he was not only one of the best freshmen in the league, but was one of the better players in the league. He's got great size. He can shoot over top of people. He makes every difficult shots.
Lee is one of those guys who understands scouting reports, schemes and how we are guarding. You can be rest assured that he is going to follow everything to the minute detail of what he has to do. So, forget about the shooting part of it, we have just lost maybe our best overall defender.
Lee gets a lot of credit for his perimeter shooting. Forget about the shooting part of it, we've just lost maybe our best overall defender. Lee is our most consistent, most disciplined, best defender.
Tonight, we won because of our defense and they didn't shoot the ball particularly well. I would say it was a combination, that we did at times challenge their shots, and there were maybe also some shots they just didn't knock down.
Tonight happened to be one of his nights. We become a very difficult team when he shoots like that.
The reason he shot it so far to the left was he never really got his left arm up and he shot it across his body. This is going to be another one to two weeks before he's back to probably feeling healthy. I would think that he would be available against South Carolina. How many minutes? What type of role? Will he be able to get back to his shooting form? I'm hopeful, but I'm not counting on that.
I told them this would be a 40-minute battle from start to finish, and if you let frustration creep in at all, you guys are going to lose the game. This is going to be an ugly game where we may not shoot well, but we have to defend and rebound.
That's one of the things we talked about with our guys. How are we going to respond when we don't shoot well? Here was a night where we didn't shoot the ball well. This was a game where we had to grind it out and find a way to win.
The biggest thing for David is to make good decisions and play very hard. There are some games, athletically, where what David can do is stretch the defense and really shoot it. So, we have to make sure in this game (Ole Miss) that we have him in the right match-up situation because they have so much quickness.
When you shoot like we did and the other team is shooting 71 percent from 3-point range, you expect to be down 15 or 20 points.
Our team battled through the adversity of the game. They battled through not shooting the ball, and we found a way, defensively, to win the game.