This season's Portland Trail Blazers have been sluggish, completely devoid of the scary playoff-level team, with an ups and downs in record and a shaky performance by core player Lillard.
It's hard to say that all this has nothing to do with the new head coach, Chansi Billups, who has no previous experience as a manager. As a player, Billups was "the most grassroots FMVP in NBA history," leading the Detroit Pistons to the championship with the tough Los Angeles Lakers.
However, after retiring, Billups' coaching level was not recognized, and he went to many teams as an assistant coach, begging for a head coaching opportunity, but he could not realize his dream. This season, the Blazers parted ways with stotts, a coach who has been in charge for about 10 years, and Billups finally got a chance.
As a head coach, a very important job is to form your own coaching team. People you trust to help in order to better implement the coaching philosophy, which is what every head coach has to do. But what Billups is doing so far is surprising.
Billups has reportedly asked the Trail Blazers to recruit their younger brother Rodney Billups as the new assistant coach. Prior to that, Rodney served as a scout for the Milwaukee Bucks and was a head coach at the University of Denver at the NCAA. This kind of thing is not uncommon in NBA circles, and some coaches will directly recruit their sons into the coaching staff, find a job and exercise their ability.
But this blatant nepotism is still easy to provoke criticism. At present, the situation of the Blazers is not good, and if you want to do this, it is inevitable that Lillard, the core player in the team, will not have an opinion. In fact, when Billups first took office, Lillard was not very satisfied, and now that he has encountered this kind of thing, I don't know how Lillard feels.