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
He gets bothered at a lot of the attention, or (that) people want to talk to him because it is a unique story. It is a unique family. He worries about getting too much attention and taking away from the rest of the guys. ... He doesn't want that.
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.
If he needs an extra day or two to rest, then we've got to rest him. On the perimeter right now, we need to make sure we have a healthy complement of players.
I'll remember this for the rest of my life.
Because he made shots, it energized the rest of his game. He was getting away from that. He was getting ahead of himself.
That takes a kid with unbelievable character. It takes a kid who cares about the team, a kid who wants to win.
Corey was a definite spark for us at the start of the second half. He made a couple baskets to get us going and he did some good things defensively.
It's teams like George Mason that give so many people hope in their lives, just seeing what great things can be accomplished.
You're playing a game right now, living each moment. Play each moment. They peaked and probably played well because of the setbacks we had in February that helped us grow.
That's generally a recipe for disaster, but because we defended the 3-point line that gave us an opportunity.
It's hard to win a road game when it's 42-20 at the free throw line. It really disrupted our flow and made us stagnant in our offense.
I went off pretty good at halftime. It's hard if you're not making shots to get off to a good start. We could have very, very easily have been up 15 or 20 in the first half.
I think the one thing that should be talked about more is our guys' will and passion to win. They've really stayed focused on winning. ... We really didn't get a lot of breaks. We had to grind it out and find a way to win.
The second half was a back-and-forth basketball game. Give Arkansas credit. They made some plays and their kids played hard and I thought it was a great college basketball game that both teams had a chance to win at times.