Fairly-Hard
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Not really but i guess that is what people are going to say.
Chauncey Billups coaching and basketball stuff ONLY!
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Ok...how did you view the Nuggets series backcourt performance?
Fairly-Hard
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Game 1
Lillard 34 points CJ 21 = 54
Rivers 6 points Campazzo 8 = 14
From now on i will just list the game and the numbers because i'm lazy.
Game 2
Blazers 42 + 21= 63
Nuggs 12+9= 21
Game 3
Nuggs (Home team) 21+11 = 32
Blazers 37 + 22 = 59
Game 4
Nuggs 8 points + 12 points = 20
Blazers Lillard 10 (Bad game) CJ 21 = 31
Game 5
Blazers Lillard 55 CJ 18= 73
Nuggets Rivers 18 Camp 3= 21
Game 6
Nuggets Rivers 7 Camp 10= 17
Blazers Lillard 28 CJ 21= 39
Every game the Blazers starting back court out scored and out played the Nuggets.
The series was lost by the supporting cast (bench) and the fact that Nurk could not stay out of foul trouble trying to guard Jokic and still provide a paint presence.
The series was also decided on the boards as the Blazers got outrebounded continuously.
Time and time again we watched the Blazers have no answer for Monte Morris and JaMichael Green.
You can only rely on Lillard and CJ to do so much. The back court was not the problem.
The game 2 loss might have been the worst Lillard 42 points, CJ 21, Powell 15
Melo 5, Kanter 4 (with 4 rebs), Simmons 3, NURKIC 6 FOULS in 25 mins 7 points. Jokic 38 and 8 on 15-20 shooting.
But there was also Game 5 which the Blazers had no business losing.
Sorry This statement-
Is flat out wrong and even more so Rivers and Campazzo are not rec league "off the Streets" players.
Like i said. This seems to be the running negative narrative but it's simply not true. The Nuggets had the league MVP and a solid supporting cast around him.
wizenheimer
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I'm confused over what you believe those numbers show.
CJ played shitty on both ends of the floor. He shot poorly, but chucked up 19 shots a game. He gave Portland far less than they needed, and because of that, Dame going superstar-mode wasn't enough
meanwhile, Campazzo, Rivers, & Morris played much better than expectations, and all three gave the Nuggets bonus production over the regular season...by a lot
Fairly-Hard
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The original statement said Rivers and Campazzo outplayed Lillard and CJ. That is assumed by the statement "Backcourt".
Then it said "Coming off the Streets". Making a reference to Rivers being waived.
Those numbers point out pretty definitively Rivers and Campazzo did not beat them.
The Nuggets beat the Blazers with a total team effort and with some absolutely horrendous performances by the Blazers supporting cast.
If you can't see that then i don't know what to tell you.
Look at all six box scores. The numbers speak for themselves.
The league MVP and a solid team around him beat the Blazers but even that took the Blazers giving them games 2 and 5.
Blazers very easily could have and IMO should have won that series in 5 games.
blazerkor
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I think you missed the original point. We got beat by them in spite of them being so injury ravaged that Rivers and Campazzo had to start. Yeah, all but one game our starting back court did put up more points than them... by a wide margin and we still lost.
We obviously could not have "very easily" won that series because we lost it. And in five games? We didn't even take them to seven.
I'm pretty sure the idea behind the post that you are still responding to is that we got beaten in 6 by a team missing Murray, Dozier and Barton. A team whose back court was severely depleted by injury. A team that wasn't good and got swept by the Suns right after beating us. So if they were so bad that they couldn't even put up a fight against Phoenix and we were obviously worse than them, where does that leave us?
Fairly-Hard
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Sorry. Every game the back court put up more points. Every Game.
No i didn't miss the original point.
The original point said a back court off the street outplayed this starting five. It ain't true. Never gonna be.
Game three the Blazers played to stop Jokic. Some how Rivers makes four 3 pointers in 3 minutes and now he outplayed our back court.
If you play that game again you want him taking those shots every time. They covered Jokic and Gordon and Porter. Even Campazzo is a better 3 point shooter than Rivers.
In todays game you will find an open shooter. With a center who passes like Jokic he will find an open look. If you don't cover Jokic he will sink it himself.
Rivers deserves respect for hitting those 4 shots. He won't ever do that again is my bet.
If the Blazers win game three that series ends much differently IMO.
blazerkor
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OK if you want to take what was said literally that's your business. Pretty obviously the point was that a team that was starting those guys beat us... obviously no one thinks that Rivers and Campazzo were more key in beating us than Jokic, Porter and Gordon.
We can also play pretend with what ifs all we want and there's a series about that kind of thing on Disney+ right now if you're into Marvel shit. I really have no clue whatsoever what would have happened if we would have won game three but it's not like that game came down to us missing a game winner or anything. It was lost because we couldn't sustain enough consecutive stops (kind of our M.O.). The fact remains that without three of their four best back court players, one of which is the second best player on that roster when healthy, they did away with us in six games. Game six was won with them taking the lead in the fourth and keeping it comfortably from the midway point of that quarter until the end of our season.
I don't really care though because just how close we were to being good enough to beat the Denver squad that got their asses handed to them by an actual good team doesn't really matter does it? We lost to them, they weren't good and therefore the team that we had last season was a really bad playoff team. Hell if teams weren't losing games so they could play us we might not have been in the playoffs. We didn't make meaningful changes to that roster. How much of a difference Chauncey will make is a real variable but doesn't seem to be great enough to take us from a first round loser to a contender. If you don't agree with all of that then have fun drinking Olshey's Kool-Aid.
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Even better point.
Scalma
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https://theathletic.com/2824709/202...-chauncey-billups-future-tyronn-lue-moved-in/
The backstory to how Chauncey Billups pivoted his career into coaching still makes him chuckle.
“We literally could have had a reality television show about it,” Billups said. “The cameras should have been running. It was that funny. It was crazy.”
The scene was his 15,000-square foot home in Denver during the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main characters were Billups and Tyronn Lue, one of Billups’ closest friends who was then an assistant with the LA Clippers. The supporting cast was Damon Jones, the former NBA player and former Lue assistant in Cleveland, Jay “Doodles” Carter, the cousin of Lue, and Billups’ brother, Rodney.
The plot was turning Billups, 44, the former NBA star, into an NBA coach.
For six weeks, while the NBA and the world were on pause, Billups’ home transformed into a coaching camp, conducted by Lue. With the blessing of Billups’ wife, Piper, the trio of Lue, Jones and Carter moved into their home. There was daily film study. Discussions on philosophies and strategy. And on the basketball court in Billups’ backyard, plays were put to life.
“I couldn’t wait until the next day,” Billups said. “We would get done, and I would be like, ‘Tomorrow, I want to see if he has something for this … .’ ”
The daily sessions would last four to five hours. There was enough comedy throughout the six weeks — Jones getting a bad haircut from Doodles, the playful arguments during games of dominoes and cards — to keep it entertaining. But behind the laughs and jokes, everyone could sense something more serious was taking form. Billups was beginning to love, and understand, coaching.
“He just dove into it, full steam ahead,” Lue said.
This summer, just more than a year after Lue schooled Billups on the nuances of coaching, the Trail Blazers hired Billups to be their head coach.
When the Blazers hired Billups, his only experience was serving on Lue’s staff last season with the Clippers. So last week, when Billups met with his coaching staff in Portland, he leveled with them: they all had more experience than him, and as a result, he was going to have to lean on them.
“I’m not afraid to raise my hand and admit that,” Billups said.
But the truth is, Billups is not as inexperienced as his résumé would suggest.
Those six weeks at his home with Lue were an incredible foundation.
“It propelled him to be where he is today because he had a longer time to work on all that stuff — learning how to draw the plays up, learning the plays, all the different defenses and everything,” Lue said. “For that six weeks, we worked hard and grinded.”
While the formation of the six-week coaching clinic was rather impromptu — who can predict a pandemic after all? — the concept of turning Billups into a coach had long been a pursuit of noted coaches such as Larry Brown, George Karl and Lue.
“I tried to get him to come coach with me in Cleveland,” Lue said. “Love his personality. Love how he can tell the truth, how guys respect him. I wanted to bring him along, but he wanted to be in the front office.”
Billups had long been set on a front office position in the NBA, stemming from his respect for and connection to former Detroit Pistons executive Joe Dumars, who built the championship team that Billups led as a point guard.
“I felt like I learned from Joe D. what it takes to be a champion — from a personnel standpoint and personality standpoint — not only on the teams I was on and the way he built them, but the personality he has in really connecting with people,” Billups said. “I felt I could be really good at that job. Really good.”
But there was a shift in his thinking in the last couple of years when he did some consulting for Milwaukee Bucks general manager Jon Horst. He would travel to Milwaukee two to three times a year and pick Horst’s brain about the day-to-day of being an executive. It was during these trips when he realized a good front office executive was more or less hands-off during the course of the season.
“When you sit in the seat of Neil (Olshey), Jon (Horst) or Joe D., you have to allow the coach the opportunity to really touch the guys every day; pour into them every day, every day,” Billups said. “That’s what you are hiring him to do. You have to be on the back burner. If things slip through the cracks, then you clean it up. I feel like my best gift is every day, every day. That’s when I began to think maybe I should go the other way.”
Around that same time, Billups was being drawn back into the game. When the pandemic hit, he was doing television work for ESPN and the Clippers. Doc Rivers, then head coach of the Clippers, was allowing him to observe practices and sit in on coaching meetings.
“I went to every practice,” Billups said. “Ty was an assistant, and we were spending a lot of time together, and I just really started thinking about the coaching thing.”
Broadcasting the games was enjoyable, but it didn’t satisfy his competitive edge.
“I could call a game and do a really good job, and (ESPN announcer) Doris Burke would be ‘Chaunce, that was good, you did a good job’ … but it didn’t feel like I had won,” Billups said. “The game was over and I didn’t win or lose. It was just … cool, the game is over. So I enjoyed it, liked it, but I was missing something.”
He was missing the competition of games. Missing the strategy. Missing the challenge. And that’s what Lue, and his two companions brought when they showed up to his front door.
The friendship between Billups and Lue started when they were 16 and playing on the AAU circuit, Billups for the Oakland Soldiers and Lue for a Kansas City team. Lue torched Billups and the Soldiers and the two started interacting more and more as they ran into each other at other tournaments. Both went on to attend then-Big 12 schools — Billups went to Colorado and Lue Nebraska — during which they kept in close contact.
Eventually, they became so close that Billups asked Lue to be the godfather to Cydney, the first of his three daughters.
“We just have this really special relationship. I don’t know what it is, we have a few things in common — he’s down to earth, humble, loves basketball … and is just such a loyal dude,” Billups said. “But at the same time, we have different personalities. He’s been pretty much a single guy his whole life, and I’ve been with my wife for what seems like my entire life. But we just started to talk at these tournaments and it just continued to grow.”
When both were drafted into the NBA, they started training with each other and living together in the summer, first in Bradenton, Fla., and then Las Vegas. Soon, about 20 NBA players would congregate to Vegas for the daily runs with Lue and Billups.
It was then when Billups first got wind that Lue had a special eye for the game. For the pickup games, Lue was in charge of selecting the teams. Billups would always end up with the big-name players, while Lue had a carefully selected team that played to his pick-and-roll strengths, including a center who could shoot and a smart, versatile small forward who could defend.
“The night before the games, we would be at home and he would be thinking about who is on his team and the actions that he wanted them to play,” Billups said. “I’m sitting back like, ‘Bro, you talking about the games tomorrow?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I got Jared Dudley because Duds …’ and I’m like, you can have Dudley … and then they would always win. Even back then he was such a tactician.”
So when Lue kept on him about his coaching future, Billups listened. But when he opened his front door he had no idea how in-depth they were about to get.
A key moment in the transformation of Billups from a broadcaster into an aspiring coach started with the hiring of a chef.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, and Lue suggested that he, Jones and Carter join Billups in Denver, Billups had to think it through. The pandemic was offering Billups a rare opportunity to spend quality time at home with his wife and three daughters. Did he want to jeopardize that?
Also, he wasn’t going to thrust the responsibility of cooking for three more people upon his wife. She had given him the blessing to have the guests stay with them, but before Billups would commit, he wanted to find a chef. Luckily, with the pandemic shutting down many of the restaurants, Billups was able to hire the top chef from Ocean Prime, who moved in and cooked for the family.
“We worked a deal where me and Ty split the chef … and the rest is history,” Billups said.
With the logistics worked out, the sessions began.
One morning, Lue would spend hours going over the best ATO (after timeout) plays around the league. The next day, he might highlight all the best late-game plays. Another day, the topic would be the best defensive sets.
“He would go over who he from a coaching standpoint really respects the most in all those areas, and then we would watch film about what he was talking about,” Billups said. “And we would go through it, I would ask, ‘Why do you think this is so special? … And he would show me something I wasn’t looking for … and I would be, oh shit, that was good.”
For every point Lue made, there were two questions Billups asked.
“He said he wanted to learn, he wanted to get involved, and he dove into it,” Lue said. “So every day, four or five hours a day, he’s drawing up plays, he’s watching film. We’d go onto the basketball court in the back of his house — me, him, Doodles, D. Jones, his brother Stick — and we’d go through plays on the court.”
Once it began to look like the NBA might return, Lue spent much of his days in Zoom meetings with the Clippers. Although it cut down on the hands-on teachings, it created another opportunity for Billups to learn about game planning. The Clippers were beginning to prepare and discuss potential playoff opponents, and how to attack and defend.
“He would dip off and do his things in coaches meetings, so I would sit back and let him do his thing, and then ask questions,” Billups said. “I would ask, oh, I don’t know, ‘Why you running Floppy Double against Denver?’ And he would say, ‘Well, they switch a lot and we want to get Joker in the second screen …’ and I’d be, oh shit, that makes sense. OK, what if you played Dallas … .”
It was an eye-opening experience for Billups, who always considered himself a cerebral player. He learned it was one thing to be a point guard running a team, but it was another thing to be a coach in charge of making all the parts work as one. And it was yet another thing in how to scheme, and how to prepare a counterattack, for opponents.
Each day, he said it felt like he was peeling back a different layer of the game.
“It opened my lens up,” Billups said. “I always took pride in being cerebral and being two or three steps ahead of the play. I was always ahead. But that was as a point guard. As a coach, if you think only from the point guard position, you are behind.”
The game he had played for so long was suddenly new to him. And he loved it.
“I damn near felt like a rookie,” Billups said. “And that made me feel like, this is dope. I have so much to learn.”
One night, as he was watching television with his wife, she mentioned that she was noticing a change in him.
“She said, ‘There is a different energy about you with this basketball thing,’ ” Billups recalled.
She was right. And that’s when it became official. His passion was no longer the front office or broadcasting. He had caught the coaching bug.
“I told her, ‘I found my next move,’ ” Billups said.
When Lue replaced Rivers last summer as the Clippers’ head coach, he hired Billups as an assistant. And Lue said Billups made an instant impact.
“He’s unbelievable, coaching our player development games, drawing up plays,” Lue said before the Blazers hired Billups. “Just him working with (Paul George) all season long, how to make plays, what reads to make on pick-and-rolls, and just being there for PG mentally. When he speaks, guys listen. Pat Beverley, all those guys go to him for advice.”
Now, is the biggest move of all: leading a Trail Blazers team that is under pressure to not only win but win big. Now.
He inherits a team that had the NBA’s second-best offense last season, but second-worst defense. A buzzword at the end of the Terry Stotts era in Portland was accountability and how the lack of it led to such poor defense.
Billups said to improve the defense he will lean heavily on the experience of his lead assistant, former NBA head coach Scott Brooks, and the knowledge of Roy Rogers, who he poached from Lue’s staff. But ultimately, he knows it will come down to his voice and whether he can move this group to defend.
That voice, he says, will not come in the form of a screaming, in-your-face coach.
“I’m big on respect,” Billups said. “There’s going to be some tough conversations that are going to be had, and it may be in the heat of the moment, but it will be handled with respect. To me, accountability is pretty simple. If we are expecting x-y-z from you, and you know that, and you actually don’t do that, then that’s also a form of disrespect. It just is.
“Like, this is what we talked about, you know it’s important, and you just don’t want to do it, and don’t even give me the effort to do it? That’s fine, but somebody else is going to be willing to do it.”
Billups says it is a two-way street with defense. If you give him effort, and the results aren’t there, then it is incumbent upon him to make changes schematically. But there has to be effort.
“I can deal with effort,” Billups said. “Because you are telling me you are all in. Everybody’s skill set is different. We don’t have a lot of lockdown defenders — not only on our team but in the league — so if you give me effort and bust your behind out there, I’m OK with that. But if you don’t give me effort, and it’s just happening out there, then you are going to be watching the game (he chuckles). You are going to be watching the game.
“But if you give me effort, now it’s on us as a staff to either adjust or do a different coverage, because something is not working. But all I ask for is effort. Give me what you got.”
When the time came for the NBA to restart, it was time for Lue and his crew to depart Billups’ home. Lue was headed to Orlando for the NBA bubble. Billups was headed back to Los Angeles, where he would call the Clippers games.
On the last day, they couldn’t help but reflect on what had transpired over the last six weeks. All the laughs. All the film study. All the long talks about philosophies and strategy. For Billups in particular, it was a time of growth.
“The day they all left we had a big breakfast and we sat around and talked about all the stuff we did for the last month-and-a-half,” Billups said. “It was like the last day of school. Just like a special day. Almost bittersweet, because we had so much fun.”
In the days before, he had let Lue know that he had changed him, that he was indeed going to pursue coaching.
“I told him I’m all in,” Billups said.
By then, Lue already knew.
The backstory to how Chauncey Billups pivoted his career into coaching still makes him chuckle.
“We literally could have had a reality television show about it,” Billups said. “The cameras should have been running. It was that funny. It was crazy.”
The scene was his 15,000-square foot home in Denver during the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main characters were Billups and Tyronn Lue, one of Billups’ closest friends who was then an assistant with the LA Clippers. The supporting cast was Damon Jones, the former NBA player and former Lue assistant in Cleveland, Jay “Doodles” Carter, the cousin of Lue, and Billups’ brother, Rodney.
The plot was turning Billups, 44, the former NBA star, into an NBA coach.
For six weeks, while the NBA and the world were on pause, Billups’ home transformed into a coaching camp, conducted by Lue. With the blessing of Billups’ wife, Piper, the trio of Lue, Jones and Carter moved into their home. There was daily film study. Discussions on philosophies and strategy. And on the basketball court in Billups’ backyard, plays were put to life.
“I couldn’t wait until the next day,” Billups said. “We would get done, and I would be like, ‘Tomorrow, I want to see if he has something for this … .’ ”
The daily sessions would last four to five hours. There was enough comedy throughout the six weeks — Jones getting a bad haircut from Doodles, the playful arguments during games of dominoes and cards — to keep it entertaining. But behind the laughs and jokes, everyone could sense something more serious was taking form. Billups was beginning to love, and understand, coaching.
“He just dove into it, full steam ahead,” Lue said.
This summer, just more than a year after Lue schooled Billups on the nuances of coaching, the Trail Blazers hired Billups to be their head coach.
When the Blazers hired Billups, his only experience was serving on Lue’s staff last season with the Clippers. So last week, when Billups met with his coaching staff in Portland, he leveled with them: they all had more experience than him, and as a result, he was going to have to lean on them.
“I’m not afraid to raise my hand and admit that,” Billups said.
But the truth is, Billups is not as inexperienced as his résumé would suggest.
Those six weeks at his home with Lue were an incredible foundation.
“It propelled him to be where he is today because he had a longer time to work on all that stuff — learning how to draw the plays up, learning the plays, all the different defenses and everything,” Lue said. “For that six weeks, we worked hard and grinded.”
While the formation of the six-week coaching clinic was rather impromptu — who can predict a pandemic after all? — the concept of turning Billups into a coach had long been a pursuit of noted coaches such as Larry Brown, George Karl and Lue.
“I tried to get him to come coach with me in Cleveland,” Lue said. “Love his personality. Love how he can tell the truth, how guys respect him. I wanted to bring him along, but he wanted to be in the front office.”
Billups had long been set on a front office position in the NBA, stemming from his respect for and connection to former Detroit Pistons executive Joe Dumars, who built the championship team that Billups led as a point guard.
“I felt like I learned from Joe D. what it takes to be a champion — from a personnel standpoint and personality standpoint — not only on the teams I was on and the way he built them, but the personality he has in really connecting with people,” Billups said. “I felt I could be really good at that job. Really good.”
But there was a shift in his thinking in the last couple of years when he did some consulting for Milwaukee Bucks general manager Jon Horst. He would travel to Milwaukee two to three times a year and pick Horst’s brain about the day-to-day of being an executive. It was during these trips when he realized a good front office executive was more or less hands-off during the course of the season.
“When you sit in the seat of Neil (Olshey), Jon (Horst) or Joe D., you have to allow the coach the opportunity to really touch the guys every day; pour into them every day, every day,” Billups said. “That’s what you are hiring him to do. You have to be on the back burner. If things slip through the cracks, then you clean it up. I feel like my best gift is every day, every day. That’s when I began to think maybe I should go the other way.”
Around that same time, Billups was being drawn back into the game. When the pandemic hit, he was doing television work for ESPN and the Clippers. Doc Rivers, then head coach of the Clippers, was allowing him to observe practices and sit in on coaching meetings.
“I went to every practice,” Billups said. “Ty was an assistant, and we were spending a lot of time together, and I just really started thinking about the coaching thing.”
Broadcasting the games was enjoyable, but it didn’t satisfy his competitive edge.
“I could call a game and do a really good job, and (ESPN announcer) Doris Burke would be ‘Chaunce, that was good, you did a good job’ … but it didn’t feel like I had won,” Billups said. “The game was over and I didn’t win or lose. It was just … cool, the game is over. So I enjoyed it, liked it, but I was missing something.”
He was missing the competition of games. Missing the strategy. Missing the challenge. And that’s what Lue, and his two companions brought when they showed up to his front door.
The friendship between Billups and Lue started when they were 16 and playing on the AAU circuit, Billups for the Oakland Soldiers and Lue for a Kansas City team. Lue torched Billups and the Soldiers and the two started interacting more and more as they ran into each other at other tournaments. Both went on to attend then-Big 12 schools — Billups went to Colorado and Lue Nebraska — during which they kept in close contact.
Eventually, they became so close that Billups asked Lue to be the godfather to Cydney, the first of his three daughters.
“We just have this really special relationship. I don’t know what it is, we have a few things in common — he’s down to earth, humble, loves basketball … and is just such a loyal dude,” Billups said. “But at the same time, we have different personalities. He’s been pretty much a single guy his whole life, and I’ve been with my wife for what seems like my entire life. But we just started to talk at these tournaments and it just continued to grow.”
When both were drafted into the NBA, they started training with each other and living together in the summer, first in Bradenton, Fla., and then Las Vegas. Soon, about 20 NBA players would congregate to Vegas for the daily runs with Lue and Billups.
It was then when Billups first got wind that Lue had a special eye for the game. For the pickup games, Lue was in charge of selecting the teams. Billups would always end up with the big-name players, while Lue had a carefully selected team that played to his pick-and-roll strengths, including a center who could shoot and a smart, versatile small forward who could defend.
“The night before the games, we would be at home and he would be thinking about who is on his team and the actions that he wanted them to play,” Billups said. “I’m sitting back like, ‘Bro, you talking about the games tomorrow?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I got Jared Dudley because Duds …’ and I’m like, you can have Dudley … and then they would always win. Even back then he was such a tactician.”
So when Lue kept on him about his coaching future, Billups listened. But when he opened his front door he had no idea how in-depth they were about to get.
A key moment in the transformation of Billups from a broadcaster into an aspiring coach started with the hiring of a chef.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, and Lue suggested that he, Jones and Carter join Billups in Denver, Billups had to think it through. The pandemic was offering Billups a rare opportunity to spend quality time at home with his wife and three daughters. Did he want to jeopardize that?
Also, he wasn’t going to thrust the responsibility of cooking for three more people upon his wife. She had given him the blessing to have the guests stay with them, but before Billups would commit, he wanted to find a chef. Luckily, with the pandemic shutting down many of the restaurants, Billups was able to hire the top chef from Ocean Prime, who moved in and cooked for the family.
“We worked a deal where me and Ty split the chef … and the rest is history,” Billups said.
With the logistics worked out, the sessions began.
One morning, Lue would spend hours going over the best ATO (after timeout) plays around the league. The next day, he might highlight all the best late-game plays. Another day, the topic would be the best defensive sets.
“He would go over who he from a coaching standpoint really respects the most in all those areas, and then we would watch film about what he was talking about,” Billups said. “And we would go through it, I would ask, ‘Why do you think this is so special? … And he would show me something I wasn’t looking for … and I would be, oh shit, that was good.”
For every point Lue made, there were two questions Billups asked.
“He said he wanted to learn, he wanted to get involved, and he dove into it,” Lue said. “So every day, four or five hours a day, he’s drawing up plays, he’s watching film. We’d go onto the basketball court in the back of his house — me, him, Doodles, D. Jones, his brother Stick — and we’d go through plays on the court.”
Once it began to look like the NBA might return, Lue spent much of his days in Zoom meetings with the Clippers. Although it cut down on the hands-on teachings, it created another opportunity for Billups to learn about game planning. The Clippers were beginning to prepare and discuss potential playoff opponents, and how to attack and defend.
“He would dip off and do his things in coaches meetings, so I would sit back and let him do his thing, and then ask questions,” Billups said. “I would ask, oh, I don’t know, ‘Why you running Floppy Double against Denver?’ And he would say, ‘Well, they switch a lot and we want to get Joker in the second screen …’ and I’d be, oh shit, that makes sense. OK, what if you played Dallas … .”
It was an eye-opening experience for Billups, who always considered himself a cerebral player. He learned it was one thing to be a point guard running a team, but it was another thing to be a coach in charge of making all the parts work as one. And it was yet another thing in how to scheme, and how to prepare a counterattack, for opponents.
Each day, he said it felt like he was peeling back a different layer of the game.
“It opened my lens up,” Billups said. “I always took pride in being cerebral and being two or three steps ahead of the play. I was always ahead. But that was as a point guard. As a coach, if you think only from the point guard position, you are behind.”
The game he had played for so long was suddenly new to him. And he loved it.
“I damn near felt like a rookie,” Billups said. “And that made me feel like, this is dope. I have so much to learn.”
One night, as he was watching television with his wife, she mentioned that she was noticing a change in him.
“She said, ‘There is a different energy about you with this basketball thing,’ ” Billups recalled.
She was right. And that’s when it became official. His passion was no longer the front office or broadcasting. He had caught the coaching bug.
“I told her, ‘I found my next move,’ ” Billups said.
When Lue replaced Rivers last summer as the Clippers’ head coach, he hired Billups as an assistant. And Lue said Billups made an instant impact.
“He’s unbelievable, coaching our player development games, drawing up plays,” Lue said before the Blazers hired Billups. “Just him working with (Paul George) all season long, how to make plays, what reads to make on pick-and-rolls, and just being there for PG mentally. When he speaks, guys listen. Pat Beverley, all those guys go to him for advice.”
Now, is the biggest move of all: leading a Trail Blazers team that is under pressure to not only win but win big. Now.
He inherits a team that had the NBA’s second-best offense last season, but second-worst defense. A buzzword at the end of the Terry Stotts era in Portland was accountability and how the lack of it led to such poor defense.
Billups said to improve the defense he will lean heavily on the experience of his lead assistant, former NBA head coach Scott Brooks, and the knowledge of Roy Rogers, who he poached from Lue’s staff. But ultimately, he knows it will come down to his voice and whether he can move this group to defend.
That voice, he says, will not come in the form of a screaming, in-your-face coach.
“I’m big on respect,” Billups said. “There’s going to be some tough conversations that are going to be had, and it may be in the heat of the moment, but it will be handled with respect. To me, accountability is pretty simple. If we are expecting x-y-z from you, and you know that, and you actually don’t do that, then that’s also a form of disrespect. It just is.
“Like, this is what we talked about, you know it’s important, and you just don’t want to do it, and don’t even give me the effort to do it? That’s fine, but somebody else is going to be willing to do it.”
Billups says it is a two-way street with defense. If you give him effort, and the results aren’t there, then it is incumbent upon him to make changes schematically. But there has to be effort.
“I can deal with effort,” Billups said. “Because you are telling me you are all in. Everybody’s skill set is different. We don’t have a lot of lockdown defenders — not only on our team but in the league — so if you give me effort and bust your behind out there, I’m OK with that. But if you don’t give me effort, and it’s just happening out there, then you are going to be watching the game (he chuckles). You are going to be watching the game.
“But if you give me effort, now it’s on us as a staff to either adjust or do a different coverage, because something is not working. But all I ask for is effort. Give me what you got.”
When the time came for the NBA to restart, it was time for Lue and his crew to depart Billups’ home. Lue was headed to Orlando for the NBA bubble. Billups was headed back to Los Angeles, where he would call the Clippers games.
On the last day, they couldn’t help but reflect on what had transpired over the last six weeks. All the laughs. All the film study. All the long talks about philosophies and strategy. For Billups in particular, it was a time of growth.
“The day they all left we had a big breakfast and we sat around and talked about all the stuff we did for the last month-and-a-half,” Billups said. “It was like the last day of school. Just like a special day. Almost bittersweet, because we had so much fun.”
In the days before, he had let Lue know that he had changed him, that he was indeed going to pursue coaching.
“I told him I’m all in,” Billups said.
By then, Lue already knew.
Wizard Mentor
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Thanks for the post. Right now, I'm thinking CJ, followed by Ant & Nas will be Billup's biggest challenges.
Tince
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I'm excited to see what Billups does. I believe Olshey says this is the deepest roster he's put together in Portland, so I'm guessing his expectations are going to be very high. Not sure that's fair to Billups, but let's hope he can get us back to the WCF this year!
Scalma
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I probably agree, but Olshey needs to shut up honestly, because I’m pretty sure he said the same thing last season. It provides no purpose except to pat himself on the back.
tykendo
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I think after a while, when you get hammered for not doing, what some perceive, your job, you get defensive. Some of the heat is warranted, but he's done a pretty nice job. If you look at his rankings , by his fellow GM's , for what he's done, he's ranked pretty high last i checked. Look at much of the comments in here, you'd think he drove us to the cellar.
Bingo Bango
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Here’s my tip for Billups: Don’t conduct interviews while chewing gum. It makes you look ridiculous.
Fairly-Hard
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Give him 20 games. Lets see what he does?
Scalma
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B-Roy
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More stuff:
Richman said role players over the course of Terry's tenure complained that Dame (specifically Dame) did not get called out in film sessions for screwing up on defense, while everyone else did.
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