Chauncey Billups Is Rare Pro Coach Involved in Gambling Scandal

Authorities arrested Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups on Thursday morning and charged him with participating in illegal gambling activity.

Billups coached Portland in a close loss to the Timberwolves on Wednesday night, the team’s first game of the season. The next morning, he was in custody, scheduled to appear in federal court in Oregon later that day. The FBI said in a press conference Thursday that Billups worked with Italian organized crime families to run games that cheated players out of millions of dollars.

Most of the high-profile modern gambling scandals in the sports world—such as Shohei Ohtani and Ippei Mizuhara, Jontay Porter, Gilbert Arenas, and Terry Rozier, who was also arrested Thursday—have involved athletes, not coaches. Billups is a rare case, a professional coach at the height of his managerial career, at the helm of a team that finally seems to be finding its footing.

Billups is the first professional coach in the modern era of these scandals to find himself at the center of one of them. His only real predecessor is Pete Rose, perhaps the most famous gambling case in sports history.

MLB banned Rose, who died last year, for life in 1989 for betting on games as a player and manager of the Cincinnati Reds. In May, MLB posthumously removed Rose and other controversial players from the permanently ineligible list, opening the door for potential induction into the Hall of Fame. The 17-time All-Star and two-time Gold Glove winner still holds the MLB record for most all-time hits.

Other assistant and college coaches who have been involved in gambling scandals in recent years include:

• Alabama fired its head baseball coach Brad Bohannan in May 2023 for his connection to bets placed against the Crimson Tide by a youth coach during a game where the starting pitcher couldn’t play.
  
• New York Jets wide receivers coach Miles Austin was suspended in December 2022 for violating the NFL’s gambling policy by gambling on sports, but not pro or college football.
  
• Five Iowa State staff members involved in the Iowa–Iowa State probe were disciplined by the NCAA in May for betting on professional and college games, including Cyclones competitions.
  
• Last year, the NCAA suspended Brody Curry (without directly naming him), the former Division III Sewanee women’s basketball head coach and men’s assistant, for placing bets on pro and college sports (not his own team).
  
• Arizona Coyotes assistant Rick Tocchet pleaded guilty to conspiracy and promoting gambling in 2007. The NHL suspended Tocchet for two years and he returned to coaching. He is now head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers.

For those within the poker world, Billups’s involvement in potentially questionable activity was documented. In a two-year-old episode of the Only Friends podcast, host and professional poker player Matthew Berkey described a game he knew about several years before that was “all built around Chauncey Billups.”

“It was basically confirmed amongst all of the pros that the game was cheated, but there was just no recourse,” Berkey said.

The FBI also arrested former NBA player Damon Jones on Thursday for illegal gambling activity and said that like Billups, his involvement enticed people to join illegal poker games.

Billups’s coaching career has been marred by another scandal of sexual assault allegations from 1997. No criminal charges have been brought, but Billups settled with a woman who accused him in a civil case in 2000. Before Portland, Billups spent one season as an assistant with the Clippers.

Billups played in the NBA from 1997 to 2014 and bounced between several teams. He won an NBA championship and was named Finals MVP in 2004 with the Pistons, who retired his No. 1 jersey in 2016. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last year.