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Ramona Shelburne
FOR A FEW hours last Thursday, it was a relatively normal morning for Jrue Holiday and his Portland Trail Blazers teammates.
Most of them had turned their phones off hoping to sleep in after a late-night season-opening loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. The biggest issue Holiday faced was whether his kids would let him sleep past 8 a.m.
But when morning came and he checked his phone, he knew nothing about this season was going to be normal again. For any of them.
His coach, Chauncey Billups, the Hall of Fame player who had been guiding Portland through its rebuild the past five seasons, was in federal custody. Billups had been arrested by the FBI in a predawn raid in connection with a federal probe into rigged poker games and was implicated in a separate probe into illegal gambling on NBA games.
The news was everywhere.
Holiday didn’t have a long history with Billups, but he thought he knew his coach well enough.
Two years ago, after Holiday had been traded to Portland from the Milwaukee Bucks in a blockbuster deal for Damian Lillard, Billups had called to tell him that he would love to have Holiday as a veteran leader on the team as it began its rebuild. But he also wanted to know where Holiday’s head and heart were, too. Holiday had won a championship with the Bucks in 2021 and at 33, was still a deeply impactful player.
Holiday told Billups he preferred to be on a contending team, and the Blazers worked with him and his representatives to find a trade (ultimately to the Boston Celtics) that worked for both sides. The Blazers got back promising young center Robert Williams III, Malcolm Brogdon and two first-round draft picks. The Celtics got Holiday, who proved critical to their championship run in 2024.
“Chauncey really did me a solid the first time I was traded here, just being able to see things through my lens and ask me what I wanted,” Holiday told ESPN. “Not many coaches would do that. But he understood because he was also a player in this league.”
This summer, circumstances had changed. The Celtics were looking to shed salary and retool, while superstar forward Jayson Tatum was out with a torn Achilles’ tendon. And the Blazers were looking to add veterans such as Holiday, who could help elevate their young core of Deni Avdija, Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, Toumani Camara and Donovan Clingan.
They had also signed Billups to a multiyear contract extension in April.
After just 117 wins in his first four seasons, the team believed its coach, and his roster, could make the turn.
This time, the conversation with Billups went differently.
Holiday told his new coach he was excited about the trade and moving his family across the country to play for him. Billups came over to Holiday’s new house a handful of times to make sure he was comfortable.
“We talked all the time,” Holiday said. “A little bit of basketball. A lot of life.”
In no world could Holiday see Billups’ arrest coming. In no way could he picture Billups being involved in what he has been accused of.
It’s a line that has been whispered across all levels of the NBA this past week, from the Blazers’ locker room to opposing coaches and players, from people merely in Billups’ orbit to those in his inner circle. The man portrayed in the FBI indictment is not the man they thought they knew.
“Honestly,” Holiday said, “we were shocked.”
AS HOLIDAY SPOKE to reporters after the Trail Blazers’ 139-119 win over the Golden State Warriors on Friday night, his teammate, Matisse Thybulle, listened and nodded along.
He liked the way Holiday described interim coach Tiago Splitter as “stoic” and that Splitter had the right “demeanor” to step into the still stunning void Billups’ departure had created.
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.
“Everyone thinks we might know more than everyone else,” Thybulle said. “But it’s like Twitter is telling us just as much as anyone else.”
Thybulle says he and Billups talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day. But it was more than that.
“Chauncey just believed in me,” the veteran wing said.
And, in turn, Thybulle wants to believe in Billups now despite the accusations.
He has not read the 22-page indictment documenting Billups’ alleged involvement in rigged poker games associated with the Mafia. Or the 23-page indictment documenting Billups’ alleged involvement in illegal gambling, leaking information about his own team to gamblers who then profited off their bets.
“Let’s not mince words,” said FBI director Kash Patel at a news conference last Thursday announcing the charges. “This is the insider trading saga for the NBA. That’s what this is.”
Back in Portland, Thybulle said that amid the turmoil, he, like the rest of his teammates, is trying to remain focused on his day job.
“It’s not really something I want to get too lost in,” he said. “Hopefully things can work themselves out and we find out sooner rather than later. But try not to let it occupy too much of your mind and emotional space.”
Still, there will be a physical reminder of this uncertainty every time the team steps foot in their home locker room. The door to Billups’ office, near the entrance, was closed Friday night. No yellow police tape. No signs. Just a closed wooden door with cold, white walls surrounding it, with no promise of it reopening anytime soon.
When he was the head coach, that door was never closed. He was always available, in person or on the phone. But now they can’t call him. Or check how he is doing. Or get advice on how to manage a massive scandal that has enveloped the league.
That door is now closed.
Before Friday’s game, Holiday and Lillard gathered the team inside the theater room in the practice facility for an impromptu meeting, multiple team sources said. They wanted to send a message to their young team.
Lillard’s was simple:
Stay together. No matter what happens. Or how much you might be worried about Billups or his family. Stay together. Because other teams aren’t going to feel sorry for us.
ONE PERSON WHO did get through to Billups was his former coach in Detroit, Hall of Famer Larry Brown. He has texted him almost every day since Thursday, he says, to let him know he cared and was thinking about him.
Another is LA Clippers coach Tyronn Lue, Billups’ best friend. Sunday night in Los Angeles was supposed to be a reunion for Billups and Lue. The two men have been close since they were teenagers playing on AAU teams in the late 1990s. Lue was a scrappy point guard for the Kansas City Blue. Billups was an All-American for the Oakland Soldiers. They got even closer in college when Lue went to Nebraska and Billups starred for Colorado. Lue would come stay with Billups in the summers and they would play every day.
After their playing careers were over, Lue even helped spark Billups’ desire to start coaching.
“It’s hard to process,” Lue said before the game, later adding, “I believe in Chauncey’s character. I know who he is as a person. I’ve been with him since I was 17 years old. So, it’s just hard to see something like this happen.”
Brown, for his part, is struggling to believe it, too.
“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.
Why would a Hall of Famer risk his reputation, not to mention millions and millions of dollars in current and future salary, to play in allegedly rigged poker games and leak information to gamblers?
How could he even know the mobsters who are alleged to have run these games?
How could he get involved in something like this?
Could this just be a misunderstanding?
Did I truly know him as well as I thought I did?
Investigators make clear they believe Billups provided nonpublic information to gamblers in one indictment. In the second, they allege he was not only aware that the poker games he was participating in were rigged, but that he helped organize them, deceiving unknowing participants whom investigators refer to as “fish.”
Billups is named in the indictment as “a member of the cheating team.” And in one particularly detailed section, investigators produce text messages between a 40-year-old Queens, New York, woman with deep ties in the music, entertainment and sports world named Sophia “Pookie” Wei and a 67-year-old man with ties to the Gambino crime family, Robert Stroud, in which they discussed the need to lose purposefully on occasion to avoid suspicion of cheating.
Billups and another member of the cheating team, 53-year-old Eric “Spook” Earnest, had each apparently put a bad beat on the same wealthy fish.
Wei suggested that they bring another member of the cheating team over to the table and have “Chauncey and/ spook lose to him.” Stroud agreed with the idea, to which Wei responded in text, “They already know all the signals.”
The “they” in Wei’s text message refers to Billups and Earnest, meaning investigators believe Billups was not just the famous athlete at the table brought in to draw wealthy players to the game, but a member of the cheating team who knew the signals they used to cheat, and followed them to defraud victims.
“The thing that scares me for Chauncey is that he’s dealing with these mob guys,” one close associate of Billups told ESPN. “If this is true, if he set people up. … It could get nasty.”
The text messages were pulled from Stroud’s iCloud account and included in the indictment. Investigators did not, however, include any direct text messages from Billups corroborating Wei’s assertions. Nor did they specify what the $50,000 payment they have bank records showing he received from Wei after he participated in a rigged poker game in October 2020 was for.
Billups’ attorney Chris Heywood provided a statement to ESPN’s Shams Charania, which made clear that Billups will challenge the accusations.
“Anyone who knows Chauncey Billups knows he is a man of integrity; men of integrity do not cheat and defraud others,” Heywood said. “To believe that Chauncey Billups did what the federal government is accusing him of is to believe that he would risk his hall-of-fame legacy, his reputation, and his freedom. He would not jeopardize those things for anything, let alone a card game.”
Billups’ next court date is Nov. 24 in Brooklyn, New York. Since he was released on bail last Thursday, he has been home with his family or interviewing attorneys to be part of his defense team.
He has been placed on indefinite leave by the Blazers.
THE SHOCK OF the arrests left the NBA world reeling and looking for answers.
Were Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coach Damon Jones the only people with NBA ties who are implicated in the probes? Or could the list grow longer?
Asked by Amazon’s Cassidy Hubbarth about his reaction to the federal investigations and arrests, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said he was “deeply disturbed.”
“There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition, so I had a pit in my stomach. It was very upsetting.”
On Monday, the league sent a memo to all 30 teams, outlining the “dire risks that gambling can impose upon their careers and livelihoods.”
Billups is only mentioned by name in the rigged poker investigation. However, he matches the description of a former player and current coach who allegedly provided nonpublic information to gamblers who then used that information to wager.
But they weren’t just any gamblers. They were the same men he had allegedly collaborated with in the rigged poker games three years earlier. Investigators allege that Billups gave that nonpublic information before the game to Earnest, the same 53-year-old St. Louis man he allegedly lost hands on purpose with in the October 2020 poker game so as not to arouse suspicion.
All of this has shocked people who thought they were close to him.
“I didn’t even know he was a gambler,” the close associate said.
After he received the information from Billups, Earnest allegedly then told a 40-year-old sports betting guru from Las Vegas, Shane Hennen, the same man who the indictment says provided technology for the cheating team to use in the rigged poker games. Court records indicate that Hennen was arrested in January at Las Vegas’ Harry Reid International Airport, trying to flee the country on a one-way ticket to Colombia.
Hennen was also a central figure in the case of former Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter last year, meaning that two of the biggest illegal gambling cases in recent NBA history are connected.
Hennen and another man then placed $100,000 on the game for which Billups had allegedly leaked nonpublic information.
The game described in these allegations, on March 24, 2023, was a rather meaningless contest between the Chicago Bulls, who were battling for 10th place and a spot in the Eastern Conference play-in tournament, and the Trail Blazers, who were steadily falling in the Western Conference standings despite some epic scoring performances by Lillard down the stretch.
It also set the stage for one of the most painful chapters in franchise history.
Two nights earlier, Lillard had scored 30 in Portland’s win over the Utah Jazz, leaving the Blazers with the sixth-worst record in the league, but still just 3.5 games out of 10th place with nine games left to play.
Lillard was listed as probable to play against the Bulls with right calf tightness as of the 4:30 p.m. PT injury report. On the 6:30 p.m. injury report — just 30 minutes before the game — he was switched to out along with four other starters. The betting lines moved dramatically throughout the day, from the Bulls being favored by just 2.5 points in the morning to 7.5 by tipoff.
The bets cashed. The Blazers lost 124-96.
The story in The Oregonian the next morning wrote that the Trail Blazers had “essentially waved the white flag on the 2022-23 season by sitting Damian Lillard and Jusuf Nurkic, with Anfernee Simons and Jerami Grant already out and while facing a very winnable game at home against the Chicago Bulls.”
After the game, Billups was asked about the position the team was in, tanking the final 10 games of the season to improve lottery positioning for a second season in a row.
“Unfortunately, it is familiar,” he said. “It’s not the best, it’s not the greatest, but it is what it is. Whoever is available, I’m going to coach them.”
One day later, Charania — then with The Athletic — reported that the Blazers were “leaning toward shutting down” Lillard for the final nine games with the calf injury. Four days later on March 28, Chris Haynes, then of Turner Sports, reported Lillard would be held out for the remainder of the season.
This was a disappointment to Lillard, sources said. While that calf injury had bothered him at various points throughout the season, he did not like the idea of surrendering while he was still in the prime of his career.
Lillard had been exceptional that season, but especially so in the second half. Over his prior 20 games, he had averaged 36 points, 8 assists and 6 rebounds. He had a 71-point game against the Rockets, a 60-point game against the Jazz. In nine of them, he had scored more than 40.
He was voted as a third-team All-NBA selection, despite playing just 53 games.
After the season, Lillard affirmed his commitment and desire to stay in Portland, but he wanted the team to do whatever it could — including trading what ended up being the No. 3 pick in the draft — to improve the team.
When Portland did not find a trade it liked and, instead, took guard Scoot Henderson at No. 3 — one spot ahead of the type of defensive-minded but still developing wing Amen Thompson that the Blazers had been seeking to pair with Lillard — he finally started to consider asking the franchise to trade him.
That process was uncomfortable. And it took months to resolve. Lillard hoped to be routed to the Heat to play with Jimmy Butler III and Bam Adebayo, while the Blazers dug in and vowed to wait for the best return.
In late September 2023, they found it. Lillard was sent to the Bucks in a three-team deal that returned the Blazers Holiday, Deandre Ayton, Camara and future draft picks.
The departure was unceremonious and sad. But Lillard never moved his children from Portland to Milwaukee. So when the opportunity to return presented itself this summer, after the Bucks waived and stretched the final two years and $113 million on his contract to clear enough salary cap space to sign free agent center Myles Turner, Cronin and Billups were quick to reach out to Lillard to see if they could all build a bridge back.
It was as surprising as it was tantalizing — a foundational icon returning to the franchise he had built, at the exact moment they were set to begin a resurgence.
“It never felt right seeing Damian in a different jersey,” Cronin said at the news conference in September, welcoming Lillard back. “[We’re] just really thankful to Damian for trusting in us, for believing in us, and for coming back.”
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Shams: Billups, Rozier will not be paid while on leave
Shams Charania reports that Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Heat guard Terry Rozier will not be paid while on leave.
THE REUNION WITH Lillard was just one of the pleasant stories the Trail Blazers brought with them into this season, even though he’s expected to miss the entirety of it with a torn Achilles.
Avdija had been a revelation in the second half of the season, following a trade from the Washington Wizards. Camara, a late second-round pick who was something of a throw-in to the Lillard trade, had developed into an All-Defensive Team player. Sharpe, the former lottery pick, seemed poised for a leap in his fourth year after an excellent preseason.
Earlier this year, Billups had recruited Splitter — fresh off coaching Paris Basketball to a French Cup championship — to help speed up and modernize the team’s offense.
Instead, Splitter ended up being the guy to take over for Billups as the Blazers interim head coach.
Splitter, 40, had played against Billups during his own playing career. But they had really only known each other in the few months since he joined the Blazers staff. Now he was being asked to lead Billups’ team in the wake of a scandal with no imminent resolution.
There was no way to prepare and not nearly enough time. He called his former coaches with the Spurs, Gregg Popovich and Brett Brown. He showed up at the training facility and told the team he was there for them but said the best way they all could deal with the emotions of the moment was to channel them into the one thing they could control: the game.
During the past few seasons, as the Blazers lost Lillard and continued to miss the playoffs, the crowd often booed Billups during pregame introductions.
Splitter’s first game Friday night was very different. It was Latin American Heritage night, so the pregame introductions were all in Spanish — a nice unintentional touch for Splitter, a Brazilian native who speaks fluent Spanish from his time playing in Spain.
“Y Tiago Splitter es el director tecnico de los Trail Blaaaaaazers!”
The crowd roared with approval. And when Splitter delivered a win in his first game as an NBA head coach, the crowd and the players wanted to make sure it was celebrated properly.
Holiday and others hatched a plan. Each player would fill a cup with ice water. After Splitter addressed the team in the postgame locker room and brought the team in for a huddle, they would nail him.
“First win under these circumstances,” Holiday said. “It’s a great thing. We waited until he got in the middle of everybody, so he couldn’t get away.
“We still have to go on, so that’s what we do.”
