Portland Trail Blazers: Is the clock ticking down on Chauncey Billups?
The Portland Trail Blazers have many issues to address. One of them is the effectiveness of new head coach Chauncey Billups. His time in Rip City may be running out.
After the offseason firing of Terry Stotts and the hiring of his replacement Chauncey Billups, Portland Trail Blazers fans believed Rip City’s team was headed in the right direction. Portland finally had a coach that addressed the Trail Blazers’ 29th ranked defense while creating a less iso-based offensive scheme. With all the injuries this year, how should we rate Chauncey Billups’ job performance and whether or not he is the long-term answer at coach?
Injuries impact the roster
Dame
There is always a bit of a tradeoff when you have star players go out and compete in the Olympics. The tradeoff is that those players risk new injuries, along with extending lingering ones. A proper offseason to heal up is ideal, yet no one would fault players like Damian Lillard jumping at the chance to win a gold medal while representing their country.
In Lillard’s case, his abdominal injury wasn’t given the proper time to heal up last summer. Once training camp and the preseason started, there wasn’t much time for him to get back to 100%. It likely contributed to Dame’s poor shooting start to the season and the overall slow start for the team. After New Year’s eve. Portland finally decided to shut Lillard down for a second time this season. They wanted to see if the injury can progress with extra time to heal. Now it looks like surgery is in his future.
Damian Lillard is planning to have surgery in the near future to address a lingering abdominal injury, sources told ESPN. The procedure isn't expected to be season-ending but that is to be determined.
— Brian Windhorst (@WindhorstESPN) January 12, 2022
CJ
Adding to bizarre torso-based injuries, CJ Mccollum suffered a freak injury on the court that caused a collapsed lung. McCollum has been out of commission for the last six weeks. Meaning Lillard’s favorite sidekick and the teams’ second-leading scorer hasn’t been around to help fill the void caused by the star’s absence.
Even More Injuries
Other injuries, along with players in COVID protocols, have taken their toll on the roster. So far, the starters missed a combined 39 games. Billups has to put a team on the floor, so there have been all sorts of different looks and rotations.
We’ve seen games where the coach struggles to get maximum effort out of his players during this time. Then there are other times where the defense looks locked in with high energy. Exactly what was expected going into the season. Portland has 16 wins and 24 losses through 40 games. The team hasn’t shown enough good to compensate for the bad.
Trail Blazers G Norman Powell placed on COVID-19 list https://t.co/UzRwoo2HeV pic.twitter.com/DiVBO8zNk6
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 10, 2022