In the early morning of Oct. 23, the FBI conducted a series of arrests of several high profile basketball figures for illegal gambling. Among them was Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Billups, 49, has been head coach of the Blazers since 2021, and coached them in their season-opening loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves the night before his arrest.
Since Billups’ arrest, the Blazers have named assistant coach Tiago Splitter as the interim replacement head coach, according to Shams Charania of ESPN.
Before coaching the Blazers, Billups enjoyed a Hall of Fame basketball career, mostly for the Detroit Pistons. He retired from playing in 2014 after a 17 year career in which he was a five time All-Star and won Finals MVP in 2004 after leading the Pistons to a championship.
While Billups was the coach of the Blazers, many called for his firing due to the team’s lack of success and even with the team’s improvement over the years, it could be argued that he didn’t have too much to do with that improvement. Yes, he added his defensive identity to the team, but players like Toumani Camara and Matisse Thybulle would have been the lockdown defenders they are with any coach. Last year in the games he missed, the Blazers won a significant percentage of their games and didn’t struggle without their head coach.
Billups was arrested with charges of being involved in an illegal poker operation tied to the Mafia. With this arrest, it is very likely Billups will not be returning to coach the team in the future, as he has already been put on leave by the NBA.
“We are in the process of reviewing the federal indictments announced today,” the NBA said in a statement shortly after the arrest. “We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”
The poker games Billups was a part of were allegedly rigged in favor of those running the games, using advanced technology, such as rigged shuffling machines and even X-ray technology to read cards facing down on the table, according to U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. The NYPD stated that when victims, some of whom lost millions, refused to pay, the mob defendants resorted to violence.
Billups was not the only one arrested by the FBI; there were a series of more than 30 arrests, but Billups is the biggest name among them.
“The fraud is mindboggling,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. “We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in theft, in fraud, in robbery.”
It’s a shocking development for a Blazers team on the rise. They flipped a switch in the second half of last season and have a lot of promise for the rest of the season. It sounds wrong, but for this Blazers team, this could be a blessing in disguise. The interim head coach Tiago Splitter is experienced with being a player for the Spurs and having been an assistant coach for the Brooklyn Nets and Houston Rockets.
As a Blazers fan, this was a shocking development, but I have hope that Splitter will improve the team due to his time with the Spurs. He also should help with the young bigs’ development on the team as a former NBA center himself.
