I love it when a plan comes together. But I honestly love it even more when a plan comes together that I didn’t think would succeed. But that’s usually a longer road, and the frustration along the way doesn’t always overcome the amount of rough times along the way. A plan that doesn’t come together – that’s no fun at all.
In four seasons in Portland, head coach Chancey Billups has compiled a 117-211 record, has not recorded a season at or above .500, and has missed the playoffs all four years.
If there is a plan, it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s coming together any time soon. But we’ve seen that script get flipped in one year before, and maybe the Blazers see that happening this time. If Chauncey doesn’t get the team headed in the right direction, he could be headed for some very uncomfortable records in the franchise history books.
Just two more losing seasons and Billups will match the franchise record set between 1970-76, and put himself on the fast track to accumulate the most losses by any coach in franchise history. Dr Jack surprisingly has the most losses of any coach in Portland history, but he also has the most wins of any coach. Terry Stotts has the 2nd most losses in franchise history, and Nate McMillan is in third. Nate nearly broke even in his time in the Rose City, and Stotts had nearly 100 more wins than losses. Chauncey has coached 328 games and has lost 211 of them; he will need to win 94 more games than he loses over the course of his new contract extension just to break even. You would need to go back to Jack McCloskey (48-116), Roland Todd (41-97), and Lenny Wilkens (75-89) as the only other coaches given multiple years as the top coach in the building, and who had a lopsided record in the wrong direction. It shouldn’t be surprising that they were all coaches during the only six-season losing streak in franchise history.
In two of his four seasons, Billups’ teams did not make it to 30 wins, only getting 21 wins a year ago. A 15-win improvement in year four was admirable, but did the coach or the roster show enough to mandate their coach being given a multiple-year extension? Has Billups been bad? No, but he hasn’t been great either, and this team needs a really good coach at the minimum. We will have to find out next season if Billups has been working toward a bigger goal, or if he peaked when no one was really looking.
It’s possible Billups is just finally seeing a small level of success after a few hard years trying to figure out not only his own coaching style, but also getting a read on one of the youngest rosters in the league. Many fans probably think the Blazers are the youngest team in the league, but they are actually the second youngest. The team with the youngest roster is actually the Oklahoma City Thunder – a team that made the playoffs. They are led by the second youngest head coach, Mark Daigneault, who is nearly nine years younger than Billups.
At 48 years old, it’s possible Billups just doesn’t connect with his players the way some of the younger coaches in the league do. His starting point guard is 27 years younger than he is, and so is his rookie center. Those kids just turned 21, and Billups will be 28 years removed from his 21st birthday when he turns 49 in September. For a guy who has been out of his playing career for 2014, he doesn’t have a ton of coaching experience to warrant so many chances to prove he knows what he’s doing. Nor does he have so much experience to lean on when young players need extra mentoring, like Portland’s roster absolutely does.
It’s a tall task for a first-time head coach to develop an entire roster and implement a system, especially when they weren’t hired to work with the current players on the lineup. Don’t forget Billups was hired to coach Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Norm Powell, Robert Covington, and Jusuf Nurkic. This was a team that was less than two years removed from a run to the Western Conference Finals and was looking for the coach who could push them over the edge from playoff team to championship contender.
McCollum, Powell, and Covington would not be on the roster by the time the trade deadline came around during Chauncey’s first season here, and the team struggled to patch together a lineup or scrape together wins. They were awarded the #7 pick in the draft and chose Shaedon Sharpe to pair with Lillard in the backcourt. New GM Joe Cronin traded for Jerami Grant to give Lillard a talented veteran frontcourt player as well. This version of the team did better than the previous one, but the result was the same – a losing record, no playoffs, and a lottery pick.
The Blazers were awarded the #3 pick in 2023, and they selected Scoot Henderson as their point guard of the future. With Lillard and Anfernee Simons already on the roster, the selection foreshadowed the team’s future plans—they traded Lillard to Milwaukee and moved Nurkic to Phoenix. Portland only recorded 21 wins, and their 2023 record was among the worst winning percentages in team history.
Portland was again awarded the #7 pick in the draft and used it on center Donovan Clingan to groom behind the veteran Deandre Ayton, whom they had picked up in the Nurkic deal. Portland traded for Deni Avdija, and with emerging forward Toumani Camara (also acquired in trade) paired with Grant, they had an improved and veteran frontcourt to pair with their very young backcourt.
They won 15 more games year over year and looked better at times, but they also had several stretches of questionable basketball. Some point to injuries and inexperience, but couldn’t that be said of a lot of teams? At some point, you have to question the coach as well, not just the situation, especially when that coach has been in the building for three years already.
A 15-win improvement is always nice, but going from 21 to 36 is not as impressive as, say, 42 to 57. Thirty-six wins is only three more than Chancey won in his final season coaching Dame here, so it’s not like the team suddenly shot forward in the standings.
It shows the team is ready to compete on some level, but we don’t quite know what that level is. Portland jumped from 33 wins in Lillard’s rookie season to 54 in his second season. 21 wins and the team leaped from a neat story to a legit playoff team in less than a year, that’s the kind of jump this team needs to make next year. They don’t need to win 21 more games, but they need to break .500; that has to be the very lowest bar set for their 2025 season expectations.
Perhaps the leap they took from Brandon Roy’s rookie season would be more realistic. Nate was in his third season as head coach and had not produced a winning season or made the playoffs. The team won 32 games in 2007 and 41 the following year. They didn’t make the playoffs, but they finally broke even on their record. They won 54 games in Nate’s fourth season as Roy ascended to being one of the best guards in the league. That’s the sort of trajectory the team is on, and a leap from 32 to 41 to 54 is a lot more realistic than going from 33 in Lillard’s rookie year to 54 the next year. It’s possible, but not likely.
They took a chance on Chauncey, now they need to see it pay off in year one of the new deal. Anything less and they should smash the abort button and get a new face in there to coach these kids. The team may have given him a new deal, but it still needs to be a “prove it” deal.
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