Blazers extend Chauncey Billups amid interest from Suns, Nuggets
Portland's coach became a hot commodity less than a year after the Blazers fired his own brother from his coaching staff.
Less than a year after the Portland Trail Blazers passed on picking up the final year of Chauncey Billups’ contract, and also fired his brother from his coaching staff, the Blazers announced they had signed Billups to a new multiyear extension as the team’s head coach just hours before the regular season finale against the Lakers.
Will this decision, as well as the decision to extend Joe Cronin earlier in the week, age poorly like the bevy of contracts the Blazers signed after exceeding low expectations in the summer of 2016? Perhaps it works out like it did when they kept Terry Stotts following the sweep of the New Orleans Pelicans, where the team will be rewarded for staying the course. I guess we’ll find out in a year.
That’s life under the Vulcan leadership of Jody Allen and Bert Kolde, you never know where you stand until a season ends. And even then, you don’t know until a contract is signed. Billups, like Cronin, and the fans, was living in a constant state of Vulcan-induced limbo and came out the other side stronger.
If you had told me at this time last year that not only would the Blazers bring back Billups for the 2025-26 season, but that they signed him to an extension, I would have been shocked. Hell, if you had asked me four months ago I would have been even more shocked. But the notion has become considerably less shocking since they finally started winning some games in January and February.
They had a horrible start to the season but rallied to post their best defensive rating since the 2018-19 season. Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe, two players who will ultimately determine the trajectory of the franchise, started to figure it out thanks to Billups challenging them.
With teams refusing to respect Scoot’s jumper, he encouraged him to let it fly, unleashing his most promising stretch of play. With Sharpe putting up numbers but zoning out on defense, he took away playing time until Sharpe proved he could take that end of the game seriously. Sharpe locked in defensively and finished the season with even better offensive performances, including a career-high 37 points at Utah this week.
But with all that said, it does feel like the Blazers are celebrating cutting the lead to 42. Next year, Cronin and Billups will not be able to lean on the low expectations as a way to motivate their team, nor as a way to show clear and undeniable improvement.
It’s also officially fair to wonder whether the Blazers are under the same spell from Klutch Sports that saddled them with Jusuf Nurkic’s contract and then Jerami Grant’s massive contract after that.
In the same way that Grant drew interest from Detroit before ultimately signing a long-term deal with the Blazers, Billups was set to be pursued by the Phoenix Suns, as well as his hometown Denver Nuggets. The Suns had registered interest in Billups last summer before Mat Ishbia signed Mike Budenholzer to coach and now the expectation is that Budenholzer will be fired after failing to improve the Suns. The Nuggets, Billups’ hometown team, fired their coach Mike Malone, and general manager Calvin Booth a week before the playoffs and were considering Billups if things didn’t work with interim coach David Adelman.
Were the Blazers just played again? Or were they right to stick with a coach who has established a defensive identity and has the ear of his players? I guess we’ll find out in a year.
Fans hoping for a fresh start on the coaching front were understandably disappointed today. But while I am against fan service as an operating principle for personnel moves (which is why I never loved the Adelman homecoming rumors), it’s hard not to feel for a portion of the fan base.
But there’s a crucial part of the Cronin-Billups dynamic that can’t be forgotten here and can’t just be attributed to the Vulcans. Cronin, while he received an extension first, was in a position to get extended in some part due to Billups co-signing him as the interim GM when Neil Olshey was fired. While it would be a stretch to say that Billups installed Cronin as the GM in the post-Olshey power grab, a team source who saw the early post-Olshey days indicated that Billups had more power and influence in that situation than a head coach typically would. And as a result, it does seem like there’s more loyalty at play with the Cronin-Billups partnership than there was between Olshey and Terry Stotts.
“I want to thank Joe. We kind of started this thing together,” Billups said in his opening statement. “We had this vision for what we wanted to do and who we wanted to do it with.”
There are also some more positives if you want to find them. First of all, Billups thinks highly of the talent the Blazers have. There was a school of thought that wondered whether Billups would want to stay at all. Billups loves to play golf and it rains a lot more in Portland than it does in Denver or Phoenix. But basketball-wise, Portland is looking like a better situation. Denver and Phoenix both look a bit like Portland did in 2021: two teams that have failed to meet the expectations and have All-NBA level players, who might be wondering whether it’s time for a change of scenery. Billups is smart not to want to sign up for teams that could both find themselves in the early stages of a rebuild sooner rather than later, but it also speaks to what he thinks of the talent Portland has.
Another positive: Billups has finally gotten this team to respond to him. When he tells them they need to get their shit together, at least with this younger group, they do. And while the job wasn’t what he signed up for, I think the job of coaching a young team looking for guidance suits Billups better than coaching a bunch of veterans stuck in their ways. Even if he had to use simpler concepts and terminology than he was used to when working under Ty Lue on a veteran-laden Clippers team, getting back to basics appears to suit him better as a coach than trying to upload his Hall of Fame point guard brain into other players.
Billups has also become rather adept at in-game adjustments, whether it’s to go to a zone defense to slow a team down or go to a different matchup when something isn’t working. His defensive instincts are excellent. Offensively, I think the system is a little too old school at times and could use fewer midrange isolations. But Portland’s 3-point shooting issues aren’t just a reflection of philosophy, but a reflection of personnel, which is Cronin’s job to fix.
What’s next for Billups and Cronin is the greatest challenge for anybody in the NBA: how to deal with the weight of raised expectations. If Cronin cannot move their veteran players, Billups will have to have some tough conversations with certain players and have to deal with the fallout that comes from that. Henderson and Sharpe both finished their seasons strong, but it would be irresponsible to think they should both keep coming off the bench. Cronin talked about how the Blazers don’t want to take shortcuts to success, but how will that jive with raised expectations?
If Cronin does make moves to improve the roster, it’s on Billups to cook up game plans and systems to maximize it. The collegial vibes that defined the second half of the season were partly due to the fact nobody expected anything from this team. They won’t have that luxury at this time next year.
Now that ownership, the fans, and the gambling public will have raised expectations, the clock has officially struck midnight on this team being a Cinderella. The weight of expectations is coming.
A little lottery luck would surely help. But no matter how the lottery shakes out, the contract extensions are both a reward and a question: Is the Cronin-Billups partnership strong enough to carry the weight of expectations for the first time in their tenure?
I guess we’ll find out in a year.