The Portland Trail Blazers hired Head Coach Chauncey Billups back in 2021 with no formal coaching experience. In the intervening four years, Billups has presided over a seismic lineup change—the departure of franchise stalwart Damian Lillard in 2023—endured a shift in front office personnel and shepherded the team through three high-profile, high-risk drafts. It’s been a heck of a roller coaster for a rookie. Billups’ overall record of 109 wins, 204 losses reflects every bump and bruise along the way.
Yesterday we opened up a Blazer’s Edge Mailbag question regarding the head coach, asking about his fitness and continued tenure. It read like so:
Dave,
You’ve spent most of the year not talking about Chauncey. Do you see him returning? How would you evaluate him as a coach? We need to hear a take on this that makes sense. I fear we will bring him back for another year or longer. Do you think that will happen?
Luke
In response, we published three areas in which Billups has done relatively well: fostering unselfishness on the team, putting young players in position to succeed on their own terms, and emphasizing a few strengths (tempo, rebounding, defense) that the Blazers have more or less lived up to this season.
Today we’re going to look at the other side of the equation, places the coach hasn’t fared as well.
Billups’ shortcomings—and at least some of the extra losses the Blazers have acquired accordingly—come down to one simple assertion. Billups is a decent theoretical coach but he’s shown himself to be a fairly poor situational one.
Consider theory here as the ability to understand the game as a whole and the strengths of one’s own team.
Billups has firm convictions about the way the game should be played, most of which reflect his own playing career as a talented point guard willing to do anything in order to help his teams win. He’s been able to convey the value of passing to his young charges. He’s helped them understand timing, when to push and when to pull back and plot. He’s emphasized the importance of defense. He’s also adopted the modern convention of three-point shooting, proving he’s not just a generational mind stuck in his own heyday. The Blazers reflect all these things when they take the court.
Billups is also good at teaching his players how to operate in their comfort zones and facilitate each other as they do so. He’s shown that he can use traditional center Donovan Clingan and wildcard point guard Scoot Henderson not just individually, but together. Toumani Camara grew his offense from the corner and Deni Avdija his on the break for good reason. Billups has accurately assessed them and helped them unlock their potential to contribute.
On paper, Billups’ approaches are pretty good. But the game isn’t played on paper. Real, live opponents try to take away a team’s theoretical plans, forcing them into Plans B-D in the regular season, all the way down to X, Y, and Z in the playoffs. This is where the Blazers have fallen apart during Billups’ tenure. Once they get to a level below ideal, the back-up response just doesn’t work. We’ll offer the obligatory asterisk here that Billups has spent much of his tenure coaching shallow rosters with young players. Plan B doesn’t always exist. Even when it’s apparent, executing it isn’t easy when you’re still getting a handle on Plan A. Even so, Portland’s ability to adjust has been non-existent. In many games, they’ve shown little indication that they even know they need to.
For the entire first half of the season, the Blazers were abysmal in third quarters. Game stories became repetitive. Portland would put up a good fight in the opening, maybe getting a surge from their bench in the first half if they were fortunate. When the teams hit the locker room for halftime, the opponent would make adjustments. Within three minutes, Portland’s momentum would melt away like sugar in a jacuzzi. Inevitably we’d endure a few minutes of the team trying to stop the bleeding with offense, usually via veterans taking over with iso plays. Only when the margin had gotten comfortable and the other team had let up would Portland regain any ground. It was like the Blazers were getting outcoached during a 15-minute intermission every night and that was determining the outcome of games.
The trend has reversed somewhat during Portland’s recent successes, mostly because their defense is more versatile and huge opponent scoring jags come less frequently. But the Blazers remain one of the worst second-half teams in the league—23rd in scoring margin at the time of posting—despite also being among the youngest and keeping energy high longer than most of their veteran opposition.
Drilling down into discreet plays and trends reveals more of the same. Blazers fans remain in near-constant agony as players with hot hands get substituted out in the middle of their streaks, never to return to action. Midway through opposing scoring parades, observers will start calling for a player off the bench. When that player checks in, success follows. But the replacement comes 4 minutes and 14 opposing points after the initial need.
An infamous example of Billups’ situational awareness came during Portland’s last game, an overtime thriller versus the New York Knicks. The Blazers were up two, New York ball, 3.5 seconds remaining on the clock. The Knicks were inbounding on their end of the court. After the teams made substitutions, they got the ball to Mikal Bridges at the top of the arc. Against him, Donovan Clingan came charging. Clingan was not fast enough to impede the shot, which Bridges hit cleanly at the horn for the win.
The obvious question: with substitutions available, what was the 7’2, relatively immobile Clingan doing in the game under those circumstances? Clingan is masterful defending in the lane, but unless Portland’s perimeter defense fell apart, the Knicks weren’t going to be able to get a credible drive started in that amount of time. If they did, Clingan is prone to fouling, leaving open the specter of a three-point play which would end the game instead of a two-pointer to send it into double-overtime.
As it turned out, that point was moot as the Knicks took the completely obvious option of running a strong-side screen to get Clingan switched onto a deep shooter, leaving poor Donovan trailing the play 23 feet from the bucket. At that point, an open look was a foregone conclusion.
This all happened with a Blazers bench replete with 6’7-6’9 switchable wings more than capable of covering the arc. Reflecting on the situation afterwards, Billups himself said he’d make the substitution call differently.
You can also see the theoretical-situational divide in half of Portland’s coaching challenges. Don’t focus on the play or call at hand. Ask rather what’s at stake. The question isn’t whether Portland’s going to win the call, but why they challenged in the first place.
Many of Billups’ challenges come at junctures where, if the Blazers succeed, they might earn a contested possession or take away one nondescript foul. An overturn won’t change the scoreboard or give Portland a new clock. It’s a potentially-correct theoretical move with poor situational application...kind of like making a superb bluff in poker at a pot that has 50 cents instead of saving it for one with thousands of dollars on the line.
It doesn’t feel like Billups is incapable of making good moves, rather that his reaction is both divorced from the action in front of him and measured in quarter-hours when it needs to be shown in seconds. The frustration is akin to watching someone approach a game-winning three-point shot with the same routine as a free throw. It might swish through the hoop for all we know, but you can’t stand there for five minutes lining it up. The clock is ticking and the opposing defense is closing. The team needs the right move, right now. Too often it’s just not there.
In this way, even strengths can become weaknesses. Many fans decry the simplicity of Portland’s schemes, particularly on offense. Simplicity in itself is not a detriment. Most NBA teams run some version of dribble-hand-off, screen, penetrate-and-kick offense ad infinitum at this point. It’s easy enough for players to pick up—including Billups’ young charges—but it leaves them enough freedom to read defenses and find each other in motion. It’s a really good starting point for Portland.
The problem is, it’s also the Blazers’ ending point and, too often, every point in between. The real issue isn’t simplicity, but redundancy.
On a classic episode of Friends, Ross rediscovered an electronic keyboard that he had once played during his young, in-his-20’s, music composition phase. You know the vibe. “My undiscovered talent is transcendent and I’m going to regale you with all 600 of my original songs.” The first piece Ross played for his buddies was fine. Notably, it ended with an incredibly grave, unexpected explosion-like sound, almost as if a rock of doom had descended at the end of the piece. Bravo. Then he played the second. And the third. And the fourth. And ALL of them ended with that exact same, dramatic sound effect. He was, at best, a single-note musician, and that overdrawn.
Too often Portland’s schemes play out the same way. Dribble-hand-off, screen, penetration, pray. Deni Avdija and Scoot Henderson—Portland’s primary ballhandlers—are prone to dribble turnovers. Shaedon Sharpe and Anfernee Simons—their big scorers—have wonderful finishing moves but seldom get past the initial defender to display them. We’ve blamed that mostly on the players involved, but it’s also accurate to say that turnovers and stymied drives are happening because the defense knows exactly where the ball is going every time.
The alternative to Portland’s sets, such as they are, appears to be Simons or Jerami Grant going into those aforementioned isolation moves. Inevitably these come against a set defense with no off-ball movement: no back screens, no cuts, just seeming confusion and surrender. There’s only one way to end the song: with another silly explosion.
In short, opponents are either prepared for everything the Blazers bring or see it in two quarters, then adjust for it easily. Since nobody seems to have any better ideas, the Blazers live and die with this narrative. Mostly, they’re dying.
That’s why, when circling back to the question at hand, I would say it’s time for the Blazers and Billups to move on from each other. That’s not because Billups is a bad coach per se. His record would indicate differently, but there are extenuating circumstances. We don’t have to make that judgment for the point to hold anyway. Rather, I’d say the team has absorbed the strong parts of Billups’ coaching. They’re now being kept back by the weaker parts. This will intensify as the team drafts and trades towards an even-more-improved roster. Development will take a back seat to actual execution, adjustments, and flat-out winning. Billups is still learning those parts of the game. He’s supposed to work the franchise and its players through their developmental curve, not the other way around.
At this point, I believe Billups himself would benefit from a fresh audience. I also think the Blazers would benefit from a more experienced situational, more complex schematic coach in the center seat. Four years is a long time when you’re winning 35% of your games. We don’t need to see a fifth year to know that the ones after need to be different. Instead of asking Billups to change—playing away from his strengths—it’d be better to get a coach who embodies those strengths naturally. Unless the new coach is incompetent, the growth curve that’s started under Billups should continue with most of these players. I’m not sure the team growth will be as automatic if Billups stays.
Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!