According to sources of Lakers Daily’s Anthony Irwin, longtime NBA coach Dwane Casey turned down an offer from the Chicago Bulls to be the lead assistant on Billy Donovan’s staff.
Casey currently holds a front office role with the Detroit Pistons but has decades of coaching experience.
“Sources say Casey has already turned down an offer to be the lead assistant under Billy Donovan with the Chicago Bulls,” Irwin wrote.
The Bulls finished the 2023-24 regular season with a mediocre 39-43 record — including a home record of 20-21 — and missed out on the 2024 NBA Playoffs after losing to Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro and the Miami Heat in the play-in tournament by a final score of 112-91.
Casey started his stint coaching at the NBA level in the 1994-95 season, when he became an assistant coach with the Seattle Supersonics, who were led by players like Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp at the time.
The now 67-year-old spent quite a long time on the Supersonics’ coaching staff, as he served as an assistant coach with the team for 11 seasons and helped Seattle reach the NBA Finals back in 1996.
He didn’t get an opportunity to be a head coach for an NBA team until he left the Sonics after the 2004-05 season and became the Minnesota Timberwolves’ leader from the sidelines ahead of the 2005-06 campaign.
But Casey didn’t have a whole lot of talent to work with during his short stint as the team’s head coach outside of Kevin Garnett, so he coached the Timberwolves to just a 33-49 record in his first season with Minnesota and was fired midway through his second season coaching the squad.
It wasn’t until his stint with the Toronto Raptors in the 2010s that he truly saw success as an NBA head coach. Casey was the head coach of the Raptors for seven seasons, from the 2011-12 season through the 2017-18 season, and during that time, Toronto won 50-plus games on three separate occasions while coming close a couple of other times.
Additionally, under Casey, the Raptors made it all the way to the 2016 Eastern Conference Finals and took LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and the Cleveland Cavaliers to six games before bowing out to the team that went on to win that year’s NBA title.
More recently, Casey had a forgettable head-coaching stint with the Pistons, but his overall track record remains respectable.
