Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
The Portland Trail Blazers don’t have time to really process everything that’s happened in the last week. The NBA schedule doesn’t allow for it. Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups was one of many arrested on Thursday as part of a years-long, wide-ranging federal investigation into rigged poker games, allegedly backed by the mafia, and other illegal gambling schemes. That morning, the Blazers players learned, just as we all did, that their coach would not be coming back for the foreseeable future (if ever), Tiago Splitter learned that he’d be the Blazers interim head coach, and without skipping a beat they all had to get ready for a game on Friday night. The Blazers have miraculously gone 3-1 since Billups’ arrest, including a 136-134 win over the Utah Jazz on Wednesday. “They’re a great team, very talented, play the right way, play hard,” Walker Kessler said of the Blazers. “The interim coach has done a great job and they’ve been playing well.” On one hand, it’s hard to imagine being able to go about business as usual, and even exceed expectations — two of the Blazers’ wins over the last four games were against the Warriors and Clippers — on the other hand, this is the epitome of the age-old sports cliches, next man up, control what you can control. On Wednesday, the Blazers controlled nearly everything for the first three quarters, outplaying the Jazz on both sides of the court. “Credit to Portland,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said. “I thought they just flat-out played harder than we did for three quarters — 22 turnovers, 14 of them live ball, not fighting for our space. We have to keep that same hunger and intensity that we’ve had the first three games." The Jazz made an an attempt at a comeback, erasing what was once a 22-point Blazers lead, but the Jazz’s fourth-quarter efforts were too little too late. At this point, though, teams should be expecting for the Blazers to defy expectations. They’ve added veteran play around their already bright young core and despite the level of the controversy surrounding the team, they’ve stayed level headed. Even when fans at Intuit Dome in Los Angeles were chanting, “F-B-I” while players were at the free throw line, they kept their cool and came away with a win. And as much as the players on the Blazers, or on any other team for that matter, would like to think that the NBA will come down hard and that gambling scandals will be a thing of the past, this is probably not the last time that we’ll hear about it. The NBA and all sports are so intertwined with the gambling world at this point that it’s nearly impossible to consume any sports content without being confronted by betting company ads or information about odds as they relate to games, players and everything in between. “Education for our players is something that not only we’re doing, but the league is doing. They understand the rules,” Hardy said. “Gambling is very close to the sport. It just is. I mean, if you sit close to the floor at any game the last five minutes, there’s a lot of people that are yelling at me and the other coach and everybody about what they want to see happen at the end, and our job is to coach the game. “So it’s a it’s a hard topic, because pretending like it’s not there would be very naive. It’s very, very present. But again, our responsibility is to coach our team and do our jobs and not worry about any of that.” If nothing else, the Blazers have proven this week that they are surviving the situation they’ve been thrust into by staying the course and doing their job the right way.
