After winning two games in a forgiving post-Christmas slate, the Portland Trail Blazers wrapped up 2024 with a harsh beatdown at the hands of the Philadelphia 76ers on Monday night at the Moda Center.
The 125-103 Sixers win was not exactly stunning on its face. Philadelphia, in a rare turn of events, was mostly healthy and had all three of Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and Paul George available. The three most talented players on the court played for the visiting team and those same visitors cruised to a victory. It’s a talent league. Talent won.
And yet.
It’s undeniable that the most tangible difference for Portland between wins over the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks and Monday’s loss to Sixers was the head coach. Chauncey Billups missed the two wins as he was away from the team due to the death of his grandmother. While he was gone they won. When he returned they got thrashed.
Nate Bjorkgren, who sat in the big chair with Billups out, is clearly the difference. Change the head, change the fortunes of the franchise, right?
Eh, maybe.
There’s an argument to made for replacing Billups and it’s a simple one. He was hired to coach a veteran team and help a talented roster take the next steps forward. The actual job has devolved into one that is very different, and likely not one that would have interested him back in 2021 when he was hired. The Blazers are a developmental team in need of a coach wired and inspired to raise up young players while losing a lot along the way. Billups has certainly done a lot of losing, as any coach would with the rosters he’s been afford. But the development portion of the job assignment has been mostly absent. It’s hard to point to a clear developmental success story under Billups. If you’re calling for his job, that’s the most reaosnable gounds on which to do so.
Reason, though, that’s rarely the realm for sports fanatics.
Instead it’s easier to point to Bjorkgren’s two wins as a proof of concept that anyone could do a better job than Billups. But using a last second win over the lowly Jazz and a solid victory over the very shorthanded and road weary Mavericks as proof of concept is unfair. The truth is that the Sixers were a big step up in competition relative to the recent opponents the Blazers had beaten and on top of that the Blazers played and shot poorly on Monday.
A more difficult opponent lead to a worse night.
The Blazers should move on from Chauncey Billups when the season ends. They should have made that decision last April, a more serious franchise would have charted a clearer path back then when it was clear what the organization needed. But the Blazers made mistakes in April that they are still feeling as the calendar flips to January.
The answer clearly isn’t Billups but nothing that happened this week suggests Bjorkgren is the obvious solution. He might be better suited for the job but using those two wins as proof positive ignores the context in which those victories happened. You can often get to the right conclusion in the wrong fashion, correlation, dear readers is not causation.
