Chauncey Billups, Portland Trail Blazers (photo by Erik Drost, via Flickr)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Lineup-lotto seems to have finally yielded a set of starters who are focused on defense. It is just a small sample size, but the recent Anfernee Simons-led units show big improvements. With the outside shut down, the Blazers are once again seeing what Jusuf Nurkic and Robert Covington can do when locked in.
In the last five games, Nurkic averaged 15.4 points, 12.2 rebounds, 4.4 assists, and 1.6 steals per game, all an increase over his season averages. Atl the time Covington has come around. The versatile forward averaged 12.0 points, 6.2 rebounds, 2.2 steals, and 1.6 blocks per game on 47 percent field goal shooting and 48 percent from behind the arc. Does their improvement feed on how much Simons and Nassir Little have improved in defending opposing guards and wings?
The youngsters are thriving over the last five games. Not only has Little been a joy to watch on defense, but he’s also averaging 13.2 points, 5.8 boards on 42 percent shooting from three-point range. He’s proved he can hang with good players in extended minutes. Little looks more and more like a starter/above-average bench player moving forward.
Then there is Simons, the diamond in the rough who finally got comfortable enough to play to his potential. Since the new year, he’s averaging a whopping 27.8 points with 7.6 assists while shooting 51 percent from the field and 45 percent from downtown. It’s impressive how good Portland has it when it comes to guards under 6’4”, Lillard, CJ, Norman Powell, and now Simons.
My original thought was this team doesn’t have the time for a head coach to go through growing pains. Basing the team off of a Damian Lillard-centered timeline, this is still the case. If Billups can’t squeeze effort and improvement out of this team post-trade deadline, how do we know he would be able to do that next season? NBA is full of first-year coaches that don’t last long when they can’t make their team play to expectations.
When Billups called out the starters so early in the season while specifically mentioning effort, I immediately thought of Nate Mcmillan’s final year in Portland. Despite McMillan’s faults, he was often able to keep the team at a high level of energy and effort. Once the team stopped showing the same drive, Portland Trail Blazers management made the change.
The primary difference between McMillan and Billups’ situations is that Billups is in his first year, and it seems that the issue could actually be the roster and not the coach. As of now, that’s still an unknown.
It’s why judging Billups after the trade deadline might be more fair and accurate. Any Portland Trail Blazers players who aren’t willing/able to improve on defense and/or give their best effort will be moved at the deadline.
Even if the team ends up shutting Lillard down for the rest of the season due to his injury, there is still plenty to look for. The keys are a) how the rest of the roster responds to Billups and b) their ability to improve defensively. Making the playoffs without correcting those weaknesses is not a win.
Billups has to show that this current team can continue to build off of their recent five-game stretch. Do they have the defensive foundation to build a contender? If the team flounders post-trade deadline and resorts to playing as poorly as they did for the majority of the first half, Billups will be looking for a new job this summer. It’s even more true if the Blazers continue on the Lillard timeline.
How would you evaluate the Portland Trail Blazers under Chauncey Billups? Let us know in the comments section below.