Is fourth-year Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, who will become a free agent if he doesn’t agree to a contract extension before the end of the 2024-25 season, actually a good coach?

That’s the question plaguing Portland fans and front office executives alike. Billups, a Hall of Fame point guard, owns a brutal 81-165 regular season record. Yes, he’s been tasked with babysitting some tanking teams, but his general managers, first Neil Olshey and now Joe Cronin, constructed his 2021-22 and 2022-23 Trail Blazers rosters thinking they could win. They were most likely wrong, even if Phil Jackson had been coaching those clubs.

Billups has some developmental successes to his credit, perhaps most notably Dalano Banton, Toumani Camara and Duop Reath this past season. Shaedon Sharpe looked to have taken a major step in 2023-24, though he was a high-level lottery pick. Even if Billups did help unlock him, the potential was known.

In a fresh piece, CBS Sports’ Sam Quinn supplies a fresh ranking of all 30 NBA coaches heading into the 2024-25 season. He, for one, doesn’t think highly of Billups as a coach.

“Chauncey Billups might fall into the ‘never had the right players’ group of coaches who didn’t succeed but may never have had a chance,” Quinn allows. “That said, his Blazers tenure has been discouraging. His teams have developed no discernible on-court identity and he’s made some bizarre strategic choices when he has had veterans to work with (using Robert Covington as a man-to-man defender instead of a helper, for instance, and indulging Deandre Ayton’s mid-range fixation more than Monty Williams ever did). He’s very much coaching for his job this season, considering he isn’t under contract afterward.”

Billups occupies Quinn’s penultimate tier, at No. 25, below weirdly still-employed Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan (No. 24), new Detroit Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff (No. 23), and former Boston Celtics champ Doc Rivers, now with the Milwaukee Bucks (No. 22). Billups ranks above only second-year Toronto Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic (No. 26), first-time Brooklyn Nets head coach Jordi Fernandez (No. 27), returning second-year Washington Wizards head coach Brian Keefe, and Los Angeles Lakers head coach JJ Redick, who has never coached above the pee-wee level.

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