Portland Trail Blazers assistant coach James Posey’s first season with the franchise in 2025-26 will go down as one of the most bizarre coaching-staff situations in NBA history.
In an expansive interview with NBA reporter Brandon Scoop “B” Robinson, the former player and three-time NBA champion discussed how the Blazers players and coaches navigated the shocking arrest of now-suspended Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, the leadership of Blazers acting head coach Tiago Splitter, the value of playoff
experience, and much more.
Posey, who enjoyed a 12-year NBA playing career and has been an assistant coach around the league since 2014, came to Portland last summer to work under head coach Chauncey Billups. The two had forged a relationship as teammates on the Denver Nuggets in the 1999-00 season. However, the pair’s reunion and the coaching staff’s plans were abruptly upended after Game 1 of the regular season following Billups’ FBI arrest on illegal gambling charges.
Suddenly, Posey, along with the rest of the Portland staff, had to adjust on the fly and work under Splitter, who had also only joined the franchise that summer as an assistant. In the interview with Scoop B, published in a Q&A format, Posey talked about the initial shock of the situation and how Splitter stepped up to lead the team.
I mean, it was tough. We were totally blindsided; nobody was expecting it because it was everybody’s first year together. We had a coaches’ retreat, we went into the preseason, and at the end of the day, we were trying to give our guys every advantage to win. We talked about the playoffs, where we were trying to get to, how it was going to look, and what we were going to do.
We come into training camp and everything, and then all of a sudden we’re hit with that news. It was like, Whoa. Now it’s just, What are we going to do now?That’s what everybody immediately thought. And of course, Tiago was caught off guard—he wasn’t expecting it, just like no one else was. But he was given the opportunity to lead us, and he did a great job.
Unexpectedly, for the first couple of weeks or a month or whatever it was, there was that realization that he’s leading our team, and he did a great job of keeping everybody in line and in check. He was upfront and kept that vision of where we wanted to be at the end of the season. That wasn’t easy at all, but he continued to get better as a head coach.
Posey also provided some insights into Splitter’s leadership style with the coaching staff and how the players responded to him throughout the season.
With the staff, too, he had things for us to do. We still had scouting games to prepare, and he let us do it our way as long as we got the message across to the players about the schemes and what we were doing. He had a relaxed, trustworthy way of letting us go about our coaching style when it came to scouts. It just continued to get better, and the players had the utmost respect for him as well. They came to practice just ready to work. You didn’t have guys trying to buck the system just because there was a new person in charge. Everybody continued to work, grind it out, and help each other through that time of uncertainty with Chauncey. After a while, that uncertainty faded away and everybody was locked in. We kept the end goal in mind, which was to get to the playoffs, and we were able to weather that storm to get there.
While the season got off to that turbulent start, it ultimately had a (mostly) happy ending. The Blazers finished with a winning record and punched a ticket to the NBA Playoffs as the No. 7 seed for the first time in five years.
Although Portland’s postseason run ended in just five games in a difficult first-round series against the 62-win San Antonio Spurs, Posey harped on the value of that experience for the young Blazers players who had never tasted the postseason.
At the end of the day, how focused, locked in, and disciplined are you to go out and master the game plan for that specific series? You never know until you get into that situation, and I’m sure it was a rude awakening for a lot of our guys. You only had Jrue Holiday, Rob [Williams], and… am I missing somebody else who really had championship and playoff experience? Everybody else, it was a shell shock for them. It was tough, and you know what? We didn’t win. But we put our best foot forward, and everybody left there with a smile on their face—and hopefully, with a bad taste in their mouth.
Like, Okay, I experienced this losing taste, but it makes me hungry enough to go out there next season and start working hard because now I know what it takes. Now you will see the difference in the regular season. Next year’s regular season should be totally different for us with the mindset of, Okay, we’re trying to make the playoffs, right? So it’s a different approach. Those games that you just let slip away in the past, you now know the value and importance of them. You can’t give those games away. It’s the mental aspect and the preparation night in and night out. You use that losing edge to know that you can get better, because you want to experience that stage again.
The rest of the interview includes Posey’s insights on many other topics: Lessons from his playing career, including championship seasons with the Miami Heat (2006) and Boston Celtics (2008); his move into entrepreneurship with his What’s Pop’n popcorn snack brand; and how he teaches modern wings the skills of defensive versatility.
Other Blazers topics in the piece include discussion of Deni Avdija’s breakout All-Star season, as well as Posey’s mindset when coaching a young, unproven team trying to move up in the NBA hierarchy.
You can read the full piece here.
