MAILBAG: How Will Chauncey Billups Be Judged This Season?
Questions about Billups' future with the Trail Blazers and Jim Moran's departure from the Rip City Remix in the final mailbag installment of the dog days.
If you missed the first three installments of our latest mailbag over the last two weeks as they’ve rolled out, catch up below.
The final one covers a couple of coaching-related topics. One of them comes up a lot—Chauncey Billups’ future as the Trail Blazers’ head coach—and the other just came up recently: Jim Moran’s departure as head coach of the Rip City Remix.
Next week, the NBA is slated to release the full schedule for the 2024-25 regular season, so we’ll have some actual news to cover. There could be some other things coming down soon, too. But in the meantime, thanks for all the mailbag questions and be sure to become a paid subscriber if you want to participate in the next one, likely closer to the start of training camp.
What is the result the front office wants to see from Chauncey to preserve his job? Is there a number? is it just development from the young guys?
- Bailey
What would it take for the Blazers to extend Chauncey Billups' contract? (number of wins, pushing for play-in, nothing?)
Conversely, with a few blurbs coming out this year about how a young team isn't what Billups signed up for, what would it take for Billups to be interested in being extended on a very young team?
- Erik
Billups’ situation this coming year, which I’ve written about extensively since the end of the season, is multilayered. He’s going into the final year of his contract, unless they pick up the fifth-year option, which they haven’t yet. Everyone knows it. Billups seems OK with it, or at least resigned to that being what the reality will be. He and Joe Cronin still have a deep mutual respect for each other and a strong working relationship, and all of the players buy into Billups. He hasn’t “lost the locker room” or any of the things you usually hear about a coach whose future is up in the air.
But at their exit interviews in April, Billups said he was hopeful next season’s focus would be on competing to win, and Cronin said right afterwards that his priority was still long-term player development.
There’s no reason to fire Billups now—he’s still well-liked in the building and throughout the organization, and there’s no point in paying two coaches when everyone knows the goal is another lottery pick. But Billups has his own aspirations for his coaching career, and by all appearances, they don’t line up with where the Blazers are at organizationally. Next offseason, with Billups’ contract set to expire, is the logical time for some sort of “mutual parting of ways” that doesn’t involve anyone getting fired.
To Erik’s point: it has not gone unnoticed by me that Billups has gone on two different podcasts in the past month hosted by former teammates of his (Rasheed Wallace and Carmelo Anthony) and talked about the job not being what he signed up for, which isn’t breaking news to anybody. He thought the Blazers would be a playoff contender when he took the job, and for a lot of reasons—injuries, front-office upheaval, Damian Lillard’s trade request, his own learning curve as a coach—that hasn’t been the case. It is what it is.
I think Billups has grown into the job over his first three years in Portland. I also think his next head coaching job will be a lot more successful than this one. But on both sides, moving on next summer is probably the best thing for everyone involved. Billups gets to put his name in the mix for jobs with a better chance to contend like he wants to, and Cronin gets to make his own hire.
Isn't it a little odd that with three coaching spots open, they chose not to elevate their G-league coach who seemed to be well liked?
- Alex
I don’t know whether or not the Blazers offered Jim Moran a spot on Billups’ staff before he left the Remix to go to Sacramento. I do know that they were big fans of what he was doing leading their G League team and would have been very happy keeping him in that role if he hadn’t gotten the offer from the Kings.
There are pros and cons to both jobs. In the G League, Moran was a head coach and got to gain experience leading a staff and putting his own imprint on how a team plays. On an NBA staff, you’re working for someone else and have less of a say, but you get to work with higher-level players and fly on a chartered plane and stay in better hotels (G League teams still fly commercial).
There are always other factors that come into play with this sort of coaching turnover. Steve Hetzel is another assistant coach the Blazers thought very highly of and weren’t looking to part ways with when he left to become Jordi Fernandez’s lead assistant in Brooklyn. But Hetzel and Fernandez had known each other and worked together for years, going back to when Fernandez was an assistant under Hetzel during his stint as head coach of the Cavaliers’ G League team in 2014. Maybe the Blazers could have offered him the lead assistant job when they let Scott Brooks go, but Hetzel has known Fernandez a lot longer than he’s known Billups and it was a full-circle moment when the opportunity came up to join his friend in his first head-coaching job. There’s nothing the Blazers could have done about that.
My sense with Moran is that he felt the best way for him to take the next step in his coaching career and work towards eventually becoming a head coach in the NBA (which I absolutely think he can) was to spread his wings and step outside of the organization he’s spent the bulk of his career with. I don’t think it was a matter of the Blazers not giving him a role he wanted, because I never got the sense he was unhappy as the head coach of the Remix—quite the contrary. But the goal when you take any job in the G League, as a player, coach or front-office staffer, is for it to be a short-term stepping stone that leads to a better job, and that’s exactly what happened with Moran.