On the morning of Thursday, Oct. 23, Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups was arrested by the F.B.I on suspicion of gambling illegally on poker games with ties to the Italian mafia.

The news shocked Portland to its core.

The Blazers, a rising team with promising young players, have been coached by Billups for the past four seasons. Under him, the team has developed an identity of hustle, defense, and aggressiveness, and were prepared to take the next step into playoff contention.

At least, that’s what the mainstream media wants you to believe.

With Billups as head coach, the Blazers have consistently been one of the worst teams in the league. 

Since his takeover in the 2021-22 season, the team had a record of 117 wins and 212 losses up until his arrest, the fifth worst record in the NBA over this period. 

However, it is important to note that Billups wasn’t dealt an easy hand. He inherited a team with a terrible roster built around Damian Lillard, and upon Lillard’s departure, was tasked with coaching a young team in the midst of a rebuild.

Despite this, the results still haven’t been good enough. 

Over the last four years, I have seen enough from Billups to know that he isn’t the right coach to take the team forward.

For a team with an identity of hustle, the team has given up on Billups too many times over his tenure. 

In the time that Billups has coached the team, the Blazers have accounted for three of the 16 worst losses in NBA history, dating back to the 1960s. 

Three of the worst losses in NBA history, over a four year period as coach.

That doesn’t happen to young teams with an identity that believe in their head coach.

Billups has also demonstrated a complete inability to coach an offense. Throughout the Terry Stotts era of the Blazers with Damian Lillard and C.J McCollum, the team’s issue was never offense — it was always defense.

Billups may have only had Lillard at his disposal for two seasons, but he still had talented offensive players such as Jerami Grant, Anfernee Simons, and Deandre Ayton on the squad. None are star players, but they are certainly enough to not have a bottom-10 offense year after year, just barely squeaking in as the 11th-worst in the season Lillard averaged 32 points-per-game.

This lackluster offense is largely due to Billups’ rudimentary offensive sets. There are no stats that track play calling in the NBA, but watch any game of the Blazers in the Billups era, and you will be shocked at how basic the offensive plays are that the team runs. 

It feels like watching pickup basketball.

Although the Blazers were a rebuilding team, Billups refused to play the young players as much as he should have. He chose to play lineups consisting of three forwards instead of giving minutes to the team’s two young promising guards, Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe.

However, in the 2024-2025 season, the Blazers front office decided to go a different direction from rebuilding, trading two draft picks for forward Deni Avdija, signaling that the team was done losing games and ready to compete. Bringing back Damian Lillard this past summer further solidified the team’s plans.

While I didn’t necessarily agree with this direction, if the team wants to be competitive and push for a playoff spot, Billups isn’t the guy for the job.

When the team announced in the 2025 offseason that Billups’ contract had been extended, it was met with resounding backlash from the Blazers fan base, including myself. 

Under Billups, the team was never going to be serious contenders, and granting Billups a contract extension until 2028 showed that the front office really believed in him. The results would have had to get terrible for the executives to consider firing Billups, and the roster is simply too talented for that to happen.

However, after the recent gambling scandal broke out, I was elated. It may well be the blessing in disguise that the team needs to become serious contenders in the Western Conference, this current season or in the near future.

Under interim head coach Tiago Splitter, the Blazers have a 4-3 record and are leading the league in steals, as well as being top three in points off turnovers and pace. 

Whether they choose to stick with Splitter as the franchise’s long-term head coach or not, the first six games with him as head coach are certainly a glimpse into the potential that the team has without Billups holding them back.