ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne has written a wide-ranging feature story about the illegal gambling allegations surrounding Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and their subsequent impact on the team.
The piece centers around how Blazers players and others within the NBA community are responding to the situation, while also providing details on the FBI cases involving Billups (in one case, Billups is mentioned by name for allegedly participating in illegal, Mafia-affiliated poker games that
cheated unknowing players out of large sums of money; in the other, a co-conspirator matching Billups’ description allegedly gave nonpublic information about the Blazers’ injury report for a game in March 2023 that helped gamblers place — and win — large bets on Portland to lose).
A through-line in the article is people’s shock about the situation and how the allegations stand in stark contrast to the high respect they held for Billups as a co-worker and person. Whether it was Portland players or people close to Billups, such as his former NBA head coach Larry Brown, the reactions of shock and disbelief were similar.
“He would be one of the last people I would think about involving himself with bad people,” Brown told ESPN. “If you talked to anybody that was involved with Chauncey, that spent time with him and knew his family, knew his kids, I think they’d be saying the same thing.”
It’s a circular refrain dominating conversations inside the Blazers’ locker room and across the league — the difficulty of reconciling a man so many considered to be a colleague, a friend, a coach, and the man the federal government presents as a criminal.
Shelburne also reported on the team meeting the Blazers held last Thursday, just hours after Billups’ arrest early that morning.
[Tiago] Splitter and general manager Joe Cronin had addressed the team Thursday afternoon after the news broke to relay whatever details and instructions they could.
They didn’t know much more than the players did at that point.
The most salient detail they told the players was simply a mandate: that it wasn’t appropriate to contact Billups, who had been arraigned and released on bail Thursday afternoon.
The article covers much more, and it includes more quotes from Blazers players and others. You can read the full piece here.
