Suddenly, the Trail Blazers are in Crisis
Chauncey Billups called Sunday's 45-point blowout loss to Memphis "f---ing embarrassing."
📍 PORTLAND, Ore. — Mathematically, the Trail Blazers’ 45-point blowout loss to Memphis on Sunday wasn’t as bad as either of their two 60-point losses from last season. Spiritually, it was even worse.
It was worse because it seemed to come out of nowhere. Going into the night, they had lost four out of their last five games, but outside of opening night against Golden State, it mostly hasn’t looked like this. They’ve lost the way rebuilding teams are supposed to lose: competing and getting good developmental minutes out of some of their young players and coming out on the wrong end of the scoreboard because the other team has more talent. Towards the end of this week’s road trip, Shaedon Sharpe and Robert Williams III returned from injuries and looked like they hadn’t lost a step. On Sunday, Sharpe made his return to the starting lineup. Things were going well, all things considered.
Tonight felt like an undoing of all that progress. It was a speed-run to last January’s seven-game road trip that included the 62-point loss in Oklahoma City and five other losses of at least 20 points. They shot 4-for-42 from three-point range. They found new and creative ways to turn the ball over, from Anfernee Simons’ bounce pass to himself to Scoot Henderson simply losing the ball out of bounds on a layup attempt. They got beat routinely on fast breaks.
Only Donovan Clingan, who had a reason to get up to play against his former college rival Zach Edey in the NBA for the first time, acquitted himself well. That they looked like this against a Grizzlies team missing Ja Morant and Desmond Bane, and starting a second-round rookie (Jaylen Wells) and a point guard who got converted from a two-way a month ago (Scotty Pippen Jr.) is concerning.
If you didn’t see it live, there’s no reason to go back and watch it later. Chauncey Billups isn’t going to.
“I don’t want to see that shit,” he said afterwards.
Here’s how Billups started his postgame press conference:
“It was just fucking embarrassing, to be honest with you. We were soft as hell the whole game. Nobody really fought. It was just embarrassing. That’s just not who we are. There’s no excuse for that. You have a lot of rough nights in this league, obviously. But I don’t even care. This wasn’t even that. Guys showed up because they had to be here but they didn’t want to play. They didn’t want to actually work. That’s embarrassing. It’s unfortunate that we had to go out there in front of our fans that paid their hard-earned money to come see their favorite team play. And you show up and do that. It was embarrassing.”
He was just getting warmed up. This is what he said he told the team in the locker room afterwards:
“I told them that anybody that sleeps well tonight, you’re a loser. It’s that simple. You sleep well after this one, you’re a loser.”
I don’t know if Billups is still going to be the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers a month from now, or even a week from now. He might be or he might not be. This is the kind of loss that can get a coach fired. It’s also the kind of loss that can be a galvanizing moment to make a team collectively say “Never again.”
That’s what it seemed like happened after the similar season-opening loss to the Warriors. They came out two nights later and battled with New Orleans, losing at the buzzer, and then beat the Pelicans in the rematch two nights after that.
Maybe they’ll have a similar bounce-back effort on Tuesday and Wednesday in the upcoming back-to-back at home against the same Minnesota Timberwolves team that just beat them by 25 points two nights ago to end their road trip, and everyone can pretend it’s all fixed—until this all happens again in two weeks. Or maybe they’ll come out flat again and force Joe Cronin to make the decision he was hoping to put off until April.
I wonder how upset Billups would be if that was the way it went. Whatever mental lapses led to Sunday night’s loss haven’t felt until now like something that’s been festering. But it’s notable—and alarming—that three-plus years into this, and only 11 games into the season, the coach who’s been through plenty of bad losses of all kinds is already taking this one this hard when everyone knew the deal going into this year.
As he has after countless losses like this, he put the blame on himself.
“We’ve lost by more points than this,” he said. “But it’s how. We’re laying down and caving in. At the end of the day, that’s on me. I’m the leader in this. This is our team, but I’m the head of this. I take that very personally. I don’t have one bone of that in my body. That’s on me. I’ve got to be better. I’ll have them a little more prepared next time.”
That the Blazers are already here, less than three weeks into the season, tells you everything you need to know about what the next 71 games will look like if something doesn’t change. They didn’t get to this point last season until January, and they were dealing with all kinds of injuries by then. Right now, they’re at full health except for Matisse Thybulle, and the results are the same.
How tenable will this be for the next five months? We’ll find out soon enough.
It's easy for me to say since I haven't spent any money on this team for years (after having been a long time, die hard fan and season ticket holder), but I think anyone who spends their "hard earned money" on this team is just throwing it away and giving ownership another reason to hand on to the team. I think everyone should boycott this team until it's sold to someone who gives a damn about the team and its fans. Don't go to the games. Don't watch on TV or listen on the radio. Send a loud and clear message.