One of these days, the conversation around the Trail Blazers will return to the basketball court. But not today. And likely, not in the coming months.
When a shitstorm hits, it takes time for the clouds and the stench to pass.
It’s not that the product in Portland is all that bad. Four starters return from a playoff team. There’s a couple of promising youngsters. And a new coach, with a decorated résumé from his days as a player, has just been hired to theoretically improve the defensive effort.
All that pedigree and promise can not, however, provide refuge from the chaos surrounding the team.
The star player is uneasy, all those playoff exits having taken a toll on Damian Lillard. A coaching search, done amid the noise of a guilty-until-proven-innocent mob, took the shine off what could very well be a stellar hire in Chauncey Billups. It didn’t help that the franchise tried to be transparent Tuesday in Billups’ introductory press conference … until the Blazers weren’t. And it didn’t help that Billups was comfortable humanizing himself … until he — or the team spokesperson who prevented him from answering a question — wasn’t.
I’m going to forgive the spokesperson for a bush league move. It was her first press conference with the franchise. And who knows what kind of orders she was under from higher-ups.
But that’s the thing. It feels like this franchise is asking us for a lot of forgiveness these days.
Forgive them for not putting more talent around the greatest player, and person, in franchise history.
Forgive them for testing our morals and where we stand with sexual allegations, unproven as they may be.
Forgive them for leaking the coaching hire on a Friday and letting their customers — not to mention their star player — wrestle until Tuesday with their conscience, their questions, their loyalty.
Forgive them for keeping chair Jody Allen from making any public comments since inheriting the franchise in October 2018, which seems even more pertinent today in light of the sexual allegations from her past.
Forgive them for firing the popular television broadcast tandem of Mike Barrett and Mike Rice.
So I guess the question today is how much are you willing to forgive? In the coming days, and the coming months, each fan, each observer, each player, will have to decide what matters to them.
If you believe in second chances, and you believe in learning from mistakes, and if you believe in growth, then I imagine come November, Billups in these parts will be more embraced than embattled.
He has some intriguing traits. By all accounts, Billups is a leader. And judging from stories from his playing days, he is a motivator. Those two traits happen to be among his predecessor’s biggest weaknesses. Also, Billups won an NBA title in 2004 playing the same position as Lillard and CJ McCollum, the Blazers’ two highest-paid players. Billups says he has “a really good relationship” with Lillard that “goes some years back.” And McCollum told The Athletic that he’s known Billups from working alongside him during cameos at ESPN and already the two have struck up a conversation.
“We’ve talked about a lot of stuff, and will continue to,” McCollum said. “From hoop strategy, defending, playoffs, to (Clippers’ coach) Tyronn Lue’s ability to adjust and scheme …”
It should also be noted that during Billups’ storied playing career he won three of the NBA’s major honors for character — the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award, the NBA Sportsmanship Award and the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year Award.
That character appears to be forged, at least in part, from the fallout of the November 1997 night that led to the sexual assault allegations and his later settling out of court.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about how every decision that we make can have a profound impact on a person’s life,” Billups said. “I learned at a very young age as a player — not only as a player, but as a young man, a young adult – that every decision has consequences.”
He was 21 at the time, and he said the experience of that night shaped him in his decision-making, such as who he allows in his life, and “in some unbelievable ways,” all of which he was not allowed to elaborate on by the over-protective franchise spokesperson.
As for the allegations themselves? Neil Olshey, the Blazers’ top executive, said the team had its own “thorough process, because some things are just bigger than basketball.”
A source says the team commissioned a former FBI investigator to retrace the case. Witnesses were re-interviewed. Tapes of past interviews were watched. Billups, in his interviews with the team, was questioned about the particulars. Olshey, however, told the press conference — which was being broadcast live by a Portland television station — that the details of who did the investigation and what they found was “proprietary” information. “You are just going to have to take us at our word that we hired an experienced firm who ran an investigation that gave us the results that we’ve already discussed.”
In the end, Olshey said the findings showed “that nothing non-consensual happened and nothing would disqualify him from employment.”
How you take, and process, all that information will be a personal decision. Olshey is asking us to trust him, and to a degree, he has earned that ask. In his nine seasons, he has brought in players of high character, almost to a man. It matters to him.
Never in his tenure, though, has there been a bigger ask, and more need for forgiveness, than this hire and how it was handled. His inability to get out front of the allegations and how the team was addressing them created unrest for Billups, for Lillard, and the fanbase. The hire may ultimately pan out, but there is no escaping that the hiring process was clumsy.
Forgiveness likely won’t come so easily from the fanbase, or from Lillard, if the roster continues to only be tinkered with around the margins. It is becoming more apparent that Lillard wants real, significant change to allow him to compete on the biggest stage. Lord knows he has earned that with his play and his conduct, which has created a bond with this fanbase like no other in team history.
After the press conference on Tuesday, there was a meeting of the minds. Allen, Blazers’ director Bert Kolde, Billups, Olshey and his staff. The hope was that Lillard would make it, too, but he had a busy schedule Tuesday. It was viewed as a last chance to get on the same page before Lillard becomes consumed with Team USA and heads to Tokyo for next month’s Olympics.
Whether Lillard made the meeting or not is moot because Olshey already knows where he stands. On June 19, Lillard met with Olshey for three hours at the team’s practice facility. Listening to Olshey answer a question Tuesday about keeping Lillard happy, it sounds like Lillard made it clear to him that he expected Olshey to show some urgency in his offseason moves.
“Dame and I talk all the time,” Olshey said Tuesday. “And Dame’s happiness revolves around winning, and having a chance to win at the highest level. Chauncey is going to inherit that now, but the ultimate responsibility for that falls on me and my staff to put a team together that we can walk into the beginning of the season and think it has a chance to compete for a championship.
“So the shorter answer is it’s on me to make Dame happy,” Olshey said. “And the way to make Dame happy is to put the pieces around him to where he feels like he can win a championship.”
In the meantime, we are left deciding what matters to us. Left wondering what to believe. Who to believe. And whether the best thing to happen to Portland will one day tire of forgiving the ways of this franchise.
Some day, it will pass. We will return to talking basketball, and how Billups wants to empower Jusuf Nurkic with more offense, and how he wants to bring experienced assistants to his bench to help him turn around one of the league’s worst defenses. And, lord willing, how Lillard intends to finish his career in Portland.
To do that, we would have to forgive. Again.
(Photo: Sam Forencich/NBAE via Getty Images)
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