Maybe we should be pulling for Billups to return

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When the news hit Thursday that Blazers coach Chauncey Billups had been arrested during the night in an FBI sting operation that included La Cosa Nostra, I definitely wanted to know more and awaited the press conference.

The news started with FBI Director Kash Patel outlining the two stings - one that involved gambling on individual players and team outcomes, and one that involved an underground poker ring. The top player on the gambling side was Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, while the poker ring was hyped by the involvement of Billups.

Patel noted the work was a highlight of the mission of President Donald Trump’s commitment to prevent crime. But, as the day went on it left a whole lot of questions above ground, and I’m very much not ready to throw Billups aside as a decent person before he actually gets convicted by real evidence.

In fact, I’m pulling for him to beat the FBI much like Portlanders these days are pulling for people with no green cards to get their day in court to actually receive asylum.

This case is messed up, and smacks of some gnarly FBI intern creating an Artificial Intelligence program labeled “ruin Portland” and showing off the results to Patel to get his personal connection to the White House.

A very key element in my resolve is I do not trust Patel to say anything truthful or to have impacted the FBI in a positive manner.

For starters, the FBI spokesman who outlined the arrests did not mention Trump at all, and he did not outline why the arrests were made at this moment in time. Billups, if you get into the small type, seems to have been involved in setting some games up in Las Vegas - in 2019 and 2020 - but that’s it. Or maybe he just played in those games thinking he was having fun?

There’s a lot of information yet to be delivered to the public, but the first round on Billups is very shaky to me. Why has his involvement been hyped so much when his involvement was so little? And, so long ago? He seems to have been the hole card for the FBI investigation that “Operation Ruin Portland” brought out.

Also, as the info moved forward it hit me - “we still have La Cosa Nostra in the United States?” Crime families? I thought “Good Fellas” got rid of that?

The description of the underground poker ring involved people losing tens of thousands of dollars and then sometimes getting physically abused when they didn’t pay. That bring up “Good Fellas”? Yes. We should feel bad for those people? Well, yes, but then ...

All the people who were losing these millions of dollars: who did they think they were dealing with when they were involved in the underground poker games? That’s where Billups shows up to attract players is what the FBI rolled out. But, that’s where the question shows up - who did Billups think he was dealing with? I’d like to know if he ever got interviewed about this by the FBI?

That Billups was involved such a long time ago makes me think the FBI treated him as a hole card - when the investigation was ready for the public it would show him off first. That he’s the coach in Portland makes it great for Patel and his cronies to show off to their big boss, who hates Portland.

Of course, getting all those FBI people in front of a camera did a bit to take TV time away from the damage being done to the White House through construction, and the heat from the Government Shutdown and the looming Epstein Files.

Billups seems primed to become a target in the player gambling sting, too, but that also has me thinking what did he actually do there? His involvement is theorized to have been that he told some people the Blazers would not be starting their normal line-up one night late in one season, which led to a blowout loss.

Starting a bunch of reserves is something a team “tanking” would do. It happens. The team didn’t throw the game - sometimes reserves play out of their minds and win, but that didn’t happen that night. That alleged info would have been a good thing for all the people betting on a game involving a team that wasn't chasing a playoff and had only the most basic reason to play out of its mind in the first place.

The trouble here is all the betting that’s involved in the world ... on seemingly everything. And, that’s an issue for the NBA and its partners who cover all the wagers made. If the ability to bet on a specific player scoring a specific point total or whatever (rebounds, steals, penalty minutes when the game is played in Toronto), it seems natural that sometimes someone is going to fix that when the over/under is five points and they’ve got a friend who could use a few bucks. Maybe they'll just get injured after hitting one three-pointer.

Nobody wants any players to cheat, but that seems like an issue first-and-foremost for the NBA Players Association, not the FBI. Can players tell when other players are tanking? Or who’s on the take? I’d rather leave those issues to the player’s union than the FBI. The FBI’s got bigger issues to tackle ... manage.

So, today the FBI showed off its lengthy investigation into illegal gambling, which involved people apparently losing tens of millions of dollars to crime families. But, the FBI didn’t say why those crime families are still around, or why it allowed the poker ring to go on for so long?

Bill Oram of The Oregonian wrote a pretty damning column about how Billups has basically thrown his career in Portland away by just being charged with this crime. But, I do not trust the FBI to be the representative of proper justice in the US, so I do not have a problem with Billups being the coach again of the Blazers because he has not been proven guilty. And, just being charged is not the same as being convicted.

Obviously, there’s lots of info yet to be learned, but Billups beating the FBI charge because it’s largely hyped up might be the best coach Portland is going to find, especially in these days.

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