Copyright The Oregonian
Next to a maple office door in the hallway leading to the Portland Trail Blazers’ Moda Center locker room, the nameplate remains. “CHAUNCEY BILLUPS,” it reads. The team’s website continues to show a smiling Billups at the top of the page listing its coaching staff. And no less an authority than Wikipedia insists, “Chauncey Ray Billups is an American basketball player and coach who is the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers. Technically, that remains true. But what exactly are the Blazers doing here? Three weeks have passed since Billups was indicted on federal charges. And while the Blazers have not acted to remove Billups as head coach, it seems the franchise is not so much standing by its man as it is simply standing by. Eventually, however, Jody Allen and the rest of the organization’s leaders are going to have to acknowledge the obvious: There is no scenario that they can bring Billups back as the team’s head coach. Not even if he is ultimately acquitted of the charges related to his alleged involvement in a rigged poker scheme. Not even if the evidence linking him to the basketball gambling scandal remains as thin as it appears to be. No, the thing Billups is most guilty of is being associated with this whole mess at all. Legal experts have rationalized that the charges against Billups lack a proverbial smoking gun. And reasonable people have wondered if Billups really knew the poker games were rigged. And if he actually knew the lineup information he shared about a February 2023 Blazers game against Chicago would be used for gambling. How much credence should we give an investigation that made Billups the face of the operation when his alleged involvement was minimal relative to other named defendants? Fair questions, all of them. Questions that assume we know all that we are going to know about Billups’ involvement. However, as it relates to the Trail Blazers future those questions almost don’t even matter. Billups is guilty by association. Even if the federal charges against him were to be dropped, there is still the implication that he was complicit in wagers made against his team, a problem that has exploded onto the sports stage not only in basketball, but in baseball, where two Major League relief pitchers were indicted this week for allegedly taking bribes to influence games. The next time Billups were to make a questionable substitution or the Blazers suffered an unthinkable loss, people would ask whether there was something nefarious at play. Remember last season when Billups pulled Deni Avdija and Shaedon Sharpe for the final three minutes of a close game — oddly, also against Chicago — when they had combined for 54 points? At the time, it just seemed like poor decision-making by a shaky tactician, and that may be all it was. But try to picture a world where that happened now. Can you imagine the scrutiny a compromised Billups would face? He will never be viewed the same way again. Indeed, even the most generous interpretation of Billups’ involvement in the alleged crimes creates an impossible scenario for the Trail Blazers to move forward. The franchise has declined to answer to questions about its next steps with Billups, who remains on unpaid administrative leave by the NBA. Either out of respect for a coach they are fond of, deference to the legal process, fear of getting it wrong or some combination of all three, the Blazers are slow-playing their hand on this one. “They can always terminate him and pay the rest of his contract. That’s always something they can do as soon as they feel on the business side it’s not a winning proposition to have his association with the team,” said Anita Moorman, a professor of sports administration at the University of Louisville. It’s possible, if not likely, Moorman said, that the Blazers are waiting to be sure they are legally protected to fire Billups for cause without needing to pay the remainder of his contract, which includes a two-year extension that Billups signed before the end of last season. “At some point they may just want to cut ties and they’re not going to care whether they can terminate him for cause,” Moorman said, “they just would eliminate the problem and go ahead and pay his buyout.” But with the team in the midst of a sale, why would Allen want to write that check when she could simply wait to hand the problem off to Tom Dundon’s problem once the deal closes in the spring? The Blazers don’t necessarily need to wait for a conviction or for Billups to accept a plea deal for the Blazers to fire Billups for cause. “’Innocent until proven guilty’ is a criminal law standard and the prosecutors will have to satisfy that to convict (Billups),” said Kenneth Cunningham-Parmeter, a law professor at Lewis & Clark College. “But the standard for what employers can judge workplace misconduct on is entirely different.” He said that employers have “a lot of discretion in determining what is and isn’t just cause for a dismissal.” The exact verbiage is in Billups’ contract is unknown. Unlike with players, there is not a standard coaching contract in the NBA. Notably, coaches are also part of a union. Billups’ court-ordered travel restrictions would keep him from performing the duties of the head coach of a team that travels to 28 NBA cities, for example. The publicity of his arrest could do harm to the franchise, as well. However, Moorman said termination based on a morality clause is difficult because it can be hard to prove that “some community standard of ridicule or disrepute have been satisfied.” “While all agreements have that in there,” she said, “that probably wouldn’t be their first choice. If they are going to terminate him for cause, I think they would much rather hang their hat on the criminal case or the gambling on basketball.” Cunningham-Parmenter said that on the poker scheme, Billups has a “decent argument” that it happened outside of basketball and prior to his employment so “is irrelevant to his performance during games.” “But certainly,” he added, “the allegation of purposefully benching players fits squarely within behavior that happens at work.” Separate from the technical side of what the Blazers’ legal options may be is the question as to whether there is any benefit of making a swift decision. Billups’ absence has not appeared to be much of a distraction for the Trail Blazers, who won five of their first seven games without him, including games against Denver and Oklahoma City. That could either be seen as a great testament to the fact Billups built something that could sustain itself without him, or as an indictment of his actual impact. Remove Erik Spoelstra from the Miami Heat, or Steve Kerr from the Golden State Warriors, and those teams would feel the absence of their coach. Being without theirs doesn’t seem to have much slowed the Blazers. With Dundon taking over as the team’s top decision-maker, perhaps before the end of this season, this is not a situation where the Blazers existing management would be inclined to hire a permanent replacement over interim coach Tiago Splitter. Splitter’s presence, and the team’s competence, gives Dundon the ability — and the cover — to be patient and make a decision at the end of the season, as opposed to Allen directing Joe Cronin to scavenge the marketplace for a known commodity like former Denver Nuggets coach Michael Malone or one of any number of high-profile options (Monty Williams, Tom Thibodeau, Frank Vogel, Mike Budenholzer). So it really comes down to what the NBA and the Trail Blazers want to do. And when. And who is making that decision. We may not get an immediate answer, but this sad situation only has one eventual outcome. To paraphrase Billups’ first NBA head coach, Rick Pitino: Chauncey Billups is never again walking through that door.
