The Trail Blazers lost their coach to arrest. They just made the NBA playoffs, anyway.newsline24

All that remained this week between the Portland Trail Blazers and their first appearance in the NBA playoffs since 2021 was one, final hurdle. It was true that their head coach had never coached in a playoff game before, and many of his players had never experienced a postseason atmosphere, either.

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Still, the coach expressed confidence that the team was prepared to face anything.

“I think we went through everything that you can imagine, right?” Tiago Splitter said Sunday.

Like every would-be playoff team, Portland had endured deflating losses and confidence-boosting victories. But its playoff résumé also diverged sharply, in a way that was unprecedented. Before dawn on Oct. 23, only hours after the team played its season opener, federal agents arrested their coach, Chauncey Billups, as part of the FBI’s sprawling gambling investigations.

A Hall of Fame guard and a well-liked figure inside the NBA, Billups was one of 31 people indicted in a pair of federal investigations into illegal sports gambling and rigged poker games. The former led to the arrest of Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, among others. Billups was indicted in the latter probe, with prosecutors alleging he had worked with scammers to attract unsuspecting gamblers to rigged games that were backed by the Mafia. Billups has pleaded not guilty, as has Rozier.

In March, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, said the government is expected to extend plea deals to 12 defendants in the high-stakes poker case. In the filing, prosecutors didn’t divulge which of the defendants are poised to receive deals.

As of mid-April, the government has yet to publicly file an update on the plea agreements.

The arrests left the league fearful and Portland’s locker room “shocked,” a player later told ESPN.

But the Trail Blazers didn’t spiral.

Nearly six months later, Portland rallied from a double-digit fourth-quarter deficit Tuesday to beat Phoenix, earn the Western Conference’s seventh seed, set up a first-round playoff matchup against San Antonio and add a coda to what is perhaps the most unusual postseason run in NBA history.

“It’s the culmination of a tough year,” Splitter said after the game. “But this group is very resilient. I think we showed that in the fourth quarter, just believing in ourselves and getting it done. I’m happy for them. They went through a lot throughout the season, and to be in the playoffs is a great accomplishment for this group.”

“A lot” is an understatement.

In March, the team was sold to Tom Dundon, whose ownership has already elicited some wariness in Portland over whether he will commit to keeping the team in the city. A day later, the NBA suspended two of the team’s executives for two weeks without pay for violating league rules about contacting a draft prospect too early.

And Splitter has been coaching to keep his job after he earned an unexpected promotion literally overnight. Last fall, he told ESPN that he’d fallen asleep the night after the season opener around 2 a.m. after having watched film, only to awaken about four hours later to news of his new boss’ arrest.

Had he been told he would be thrown into a head coaching role, his reaction would have been “that you were nuts,” Splitter told reporters this week. Yet as fallout from the federal investigations was still rippling across the NBA last fall, Splitter employed an NBA fundamental: a well-executed pivot.

The team’s mood was “not great,” he acknowledged before its first game after the arrest. “But like I said,” he added, “we gotta move forward, we got a job to do. I’m gonna get tired of repeating this: We have a great opportunity in front of us to have a great season.”

After it won four of its next five games after Billups’ arrest, Portland cooled off and was six games under .500 by Jan. 1. The Blazers won 11 of their next 13 games, followed by six straight losses, including one to the league-worst Washington Wizards.

Players complimented Splitter’s handling of the unexpected situation throughout the season as he got his bearings. Though he had experience as a head coach last season with a club in Paris, it was scant.

“Sometimes you sit at your room, away in the hotel, just thinking about the season and what’s going on and try to think a little bit outside of myself and try to look [at] what I’m doing,” he told reporters recently.

He eventually sought out advice from coaches he’d played and worked for, including former longtime San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich and coaches of the national team in his native Brazil. They counseled him to be himself, Splitter said. “Demand and love,” Popovich offered.

The belief that a playoff appearance was possible emerged after February’s All-Star Game break. From Feb. 6 to the end of the regular season, the Blazers went 19-12 and produced the league’s sixth-best defense — a significant turnaround from the defensive woes that had followed the franchise since even before its five-season playoff drought began in 2021.

“We were kind of just hanging on throughout December and January because we were missing so many guys,” forward Kris Murray said. “We had a lot of guys step up and do really good things that helped us be in a position we are now.”

The season’s biggest win wasn’t even Tuesday’s play-in tournament victory in Phoenix. It was learning that wing Deni Avdija, who played in his first All-Star Game this season, was a legitimate star around whom the franchise can build in future seasons. Avdija, a 25-year-old Israeli forward, cemented that notion by scoring 41 points Tuesday, including the game-winning layup, to beat the Suns.