Chauncey Billups Displeased With The Team’s Cognitive Errors…
Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups frustrated with team’s mental lapses…
Coach Chauncey Billups had to call a timeout just seconds into the third quarter on Saturday night in order to pursue center Deandre Ayton because the Portland Trail Blazers have been playing poorly on defense lately.
Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks were the latest team to take advantage of the Blazers with a 131-120 win at the Moda Center. That came two days after the Blazers lost 122-114 to a Utah Jazz team that was without four of its top five scorers and led by 33 in the fourth quarter.
Against Portland, Doncic finished with 40 points, 12 rebounds, and 10 assists. He consistently found his way into the lane for baskets and finished with 30 points in the first half. At half, Dallas had a 74-63 lead.
“We started off in our little down, drop defense, knowing that he was probably gonna get going,” Billups said of Doncic. “But you can never show him a steady diet. And the fact of the matter is, he makes everybody look like that, first and foremost.”
By halftime, Billups had seen enough. He instructed his team to start blitzing Doncic. But on the first play of the third quarter, the Blazers allowed Doncic to once again feel right at home in the paint.
“We say what we’re going to do at the start of the quarter and right away we don’t do it,” Billups said. “We’re supposed to be in a blitz and we don’t blitz the ball.”
Doncic set a screen for Blazers guard Anfernee Simons during a pick-and-roll with center Dwight Powell. Doncic was able to get into the paint as a result. Powell bolted to Doncic’s right, heading for the basket. While Ayton picked up Powell, who ran him closer to the basket, Simons frantically tried to get back in front of Doncic in the key.
The 6-foot-7 Doncic turned his back to Simons and then simply rose up and shot a short one-handed jumper over the 6-3 Simons for an easy basket that gave Dallas a 76-63 lead.
Furious, Billups called a timeout with 11:42 remaining in the quarter, walked out on the court and chewed out Ayton.
Billups said he hated to burn the timeout but he didn’t believe he wasted it because he felt he had to get his point across.
“But it sucks that I even had to attack that right away,” he said. “We’re getting our ass kicked in the first half. We come in, we talk about what we need to do. And boom, we come out and we’re just not focused.”
Blazers forward Jerami Grant said he understood why Billups was frustrated given that the team failed to execute exactly what they had talked about doing at halftime. But Ayton wasn’t the only violator.
“We have mental lapses at times, and that was one of them,” Grant said. “It was just building. There was a lot of things that we were supposed to be doing that we weren’t doing.”
Lapses, here and there, have been an issue, Billups said.
“We got to focus better in and out of timeouts, halftime, before the game we got off to slow starts,” he said. “We’ve just got to get better with our focus.”
Billups claims that not having the starting unit play much together has contributed to the issue. According to him, developing chemistry among players will require time, as they must accept taking on different roles and play in various combinations.
“It’s essentially like being at the start of the season and it takes teams two or three weeks to figure out their real rotation and who plays better with who,” he said. “It takes time. You can’t just throw guys back together.”
Grant, who faced Simons on Saturday in just his second game of the season, acknowledged that jelling will require time. He added that the group needs to find more outspoken leaders.
There are a lot of reserved people in the locker room, according to Grant. “A lot of composed attitudes. Consequently, we must locate that as soon as possible.”