LOS ANGELES — This was a win any coach would be proud of.
Monday, on the second night of a back-to-back, Portland interim coach Tiago Splitter rolled out waves of young, long, athletic defenders — Toumani Camara, Blake Wesley, Kris Murphy, plus the veteran Jrue Holiday — who got in the jersey of Austin Reaves and pressed the shorthanded Lakers for 94 feet, making life difficult for anyone with the ball in his hands. The result was a 122-108 Trail Blazers win over the Lakers, their first road win of the young season.
Splitter was proud of the effort, but this was not the chair he expected to be in after a big win, sitting in front of the media and answering questions about the growth of a young roster. One year ago, he had been the head coach of Paris Basketball — leading the team to its first-ever French league title — but returned to the NBA last summer as the offensive coordinator and an assistant on the staff of Chauncey Billups in Portland. Then came Billups’ shocking arrest as part of a federal indictment looking into his alleged role in promoting illegal, rigged poker games put on by organized crime families (Billups also gets hinted at, but not mentioned by name, in an insider illegal sports betting federal indictment).
Splitter was named interim head coach. It’s been an adjustment.
“It’s just like getting used to coaching again, being a head coach,” Splitter said after the win. “Just the rules are a little bit different than what I was used to [in Paris]. So I got a lot of things in mind, and just trying to adapt again to the NBA and the feeling of things. Sometimes I look at the table and try to call a timeout, just like in FIBA, and I’m like, ‘No, I gotta look to the referee and call timeout.’”
Trail Blazers looking ahead
There is a “this is our situation and we’re dealing with it” vibe around the Trail Blazers right now. Nobody saw this coming, but they are handling it as best they can — and not talking about it publicly. They are keeping their head down and doing the work. The only exception — outside of the standard official statement by the franchise — came from the team’s leading scorer, Deni Avdija, a day after the arrest, and it echoed that theme.
“Part of the NBA is just to keep playing. We’re all here for basketball, and are focused on that,” Avdija said last Friday before the Blazers’ first game under Splitter. “It’s not an easy situation. We’re thinking about [Billups] and his family.”
It leaves Splitter in a tough spot.
“You never want these opportunities to happen the way they happen, but I think he’s prepared for it,” Lakers’ coach J.J. Redick said. “And his lineage of people that he’s been around to help him prepare for this moment, I think, is important. And he’s been around great, great basketball minds, great coaches, great players.”
Splitter played most of his career under Gregg Popovich in San Antonio (winning a ring with them in 2014), then, after his playing days, was an assistant coach on Ime Udoka’s staff in Houston before heading to Paris.
“Tiago coaches hard,” Portland big man Donovan Clingan said. “You know, he’s always pushing guys, he never lets off the gas and it’s fun playing for him.”
What has become even clearer in the last week is how resilient this young Portland roster is.
“You see that they’re hungry,” Holiday said, adding that they had that resiliency before he arrived this summer. “You can see that they want to win, and right now, I think it’s about learning how to win close games down the stretch, and tonight we did that.”
Splitter also is making history as the first Brazilian-born head coach in the NBA.
“It’s, it’s an honor to be honest,” Splitter said. “You know, coming from Brazil is really, you know, a soccer country where basketball is growing, but it’s not there yet. And a lot of people follow me in Brazil and proud of just this accomplishment.”
This is a development season in Portland, a chance for the organization to see what they have in young players such as Scoot Henderson (who has yet to play due to a hamstring tear), Shaedon Sharpe, Clingan, Camara, and Avdija, and how it all fits together. It’s a job about the growth and development of players as much as (or maybe more than) wins. Splitter, a rock-solid NBA big man as a player, is now tasked with developing first-round pick Yang Hansen out of China (who is getting nightly run in meaningful parts of the game, finding out first-hand what it’s going to take for him to develop into a quality NBA player and live up to at least some of the hype around him).
That’s the focus. Getting better day by day. Portland has its head down, focused on doing that work — and that includes Splitter.
