Trail Blazers Complete Overhaul of Chauncey Billups' Coaching Staff
Tiago Splitter, Patrick St. Andrews and Quinton Crawford are joining Billups' staff amid a major shakeup.
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Weeks before their offseason begins in earnest with the June 25 draft, the Trail Blazers have completed an overhaul of head coach Chauncey Billups' staff.
Shortly after the end of the season, the Blazers let go of two of Billups' front-of-bench assistants, Roy Rogers and Chris Fleming, as well as player development coach Ryan Gomes. Another assistant, Jonah Herscu, will leave Billups' bench and become the new head coach of the Blazers' G League team, the Rip City Remix.
Now, they've filled all of those open spots with the hiring of Tiago Splitter, Patrick St. Andrews and Quinton Crawford as assistants. Leron Black, who has been an assistant coach with the Remix for the past two seasons, is also being promoted to the Blazers' staff in the player-development role Gomes left.
This is the second offseason in a row that the Blazers have made big changes on Billups' staff. Last spring, they didn't renew the contracts of his lead assistant, Scott Brooks, and his brother, Rodney Billups, and saw fellow assistant Steve Hetzel leave for a job in Brooklyn. They hired Fleming, Nate Bjorkgren and Ronnie Burrell to fill the open spots. Now, Fleming is out, along with Rogers and Gomes. Bjorkgren, Burrell and analytics coach Jacob Mooallem have all signed new deals to remain on the bench with Billups. The lone remaining assistant from Billups' original staff when he was hired in 2021, Mark Tyndale, is no longer with the organization, according to a league source.
After coaching this past season as a lame duck, Billups signed a three-year extension with the Blazers on the last day of the regular season following a 15-win improvement over last year. He is under contract through the 2027-28 season. General manager Joe Cronin signed a contract extension around the same time, giving the Blazers stability and alignment at the top of the basketball operations department as ownership navigates the impending sale of the franchise.
Sean Highkin
Splitter, who is from Brazil, played in the NBA for seven seasons and was the San Antonio Spurs' starting center during their 2013 and 2014 Finals runs. After his playing career ended, he spent four seasons as an assistant coach with the Brooklyn Nets and one season with the Houston Rockets before being hired last summer as the head coach of Paris Basketball.
In his first and only season at the helm, Splitter led Paris to a record of 23-7 in LNB Élite (the top professional league in France), and they won the French Cup championship and were promoted from EuroCup to EuroLeague for the first time in franchise history. Rockets All-Star center Alperen Şengün has publicly credited Splitter with helping him improve during Splitter's only season as an assistant in Houston in 2023-24.
St. Andrews spent the last two seasons as an assistant coach under Taylor Jenkins in Memphis after previously working under Mike Budenholzer in Atlanta and Milwaukee from 2017 to 2023. He was one of only two assistants to survive a shakeup of the Grizzlies' staff last offseason, but was let go near the end of this season, along with fellow assistant Noah LaRoche, when the Grizzlies fired Jenkins and replaced him with Tuomas Iisalo just before the playoffs.
The 34-year-old Crawford is coming off winning the 2025 G League championship as the head coach of the Stockton Kings. He was previously an assistant with the Suns, Mavericks, Lakers and Hornets. He was a part of Frank Vogel's championship-winning staff with the Lakers in the 2019-20 season, and reunited with Vogel in Phoenix for the 2023-24 season before Vogel and most of his staff were let go after one season.
Herscu, who joined Billups' staff before the 2022-23 season, takes over as head coach of the Remix after assistant GM Sergi Oliva coached the team last season. The Blazers' plan was always for Oliva to return full-time to the front office after coaching in the G League for one season, and now Herscu will be his in-house replacement. He was the head coach of the Blazers' Summer League team in Las Vegas each of the last two years and served as a guest coach last year at the NBA's predraft combine in Chicago. With the Remix, he'll have the opportunity to get a full season of head coaching experience.
The Blazers' lead video coordinator, Eli Kell-Abrams, will be joining Herscu as an assistant coach with the Remix.
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