Billups on the Trade

RipCity · Nov 14, 2008

It's pretty long but well worth the read.

CLEVELAND -- Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton were crying. There they were, two NBA All-Stars, in Billups’ room in the Hilton City Center in Charlotte … crying. And laughing. And crying again.
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The Pistons had just traded Billups to the Denver Nuggets for Allen Iverson. Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince had gotten word that morning, when Billups did not attend the team’s shootaround. They got back to the hotel and pounded on Billups’ door.

Billups was on the phone with his wife, Piper. He told her he’d call her back later. It turned out to be much later.

“It was the hardest two or three hours that I’ve had in a long, long time in my life,” Billups said. “We just couldn’t believe that it’s over. It’s over. That’s the thing that’s so tough about trades. No matter what happens, it’s over. So those two or three hours were crazy.”

They reminisced, told stories, savored their last hours before Billups’ 4 p.m. flight to another franchise. It was a strange dynamic, and not just because of the crying.

The three had been teammates since 2002, when they joined the Pistons. There had been trade rumors all summer. Pistons president Joe Dumars had told Billups that he had offered Billups and Prince for Denver’s Carmelo Anthony, and that he had turned down a Billups-for-Iverson trade over the summer. Once the season started, Billups figured the Pistons would stick with their core.

Now Billups knew he was gone. Prince knew the trade meant that he probably would stay put. And Hamilton had just agreed, days earlier, to a three-year contract extension.

There is no place for sentiment in the NBA. But there was a place for it in Chauncey Billups’ hotel room that day.

“It was good,” Billups said in a wide-ranging interview Thursday, at the Nuggets’ team hotel in Cleveland. “It was deep. I will never forget my six years in Detroit, and I will never forget those three hours that I spent with my two brothers in that room.”
Career commitment?

In the summer of 2007, Chauncey Billups was one of the premier free agents on the market. He was 30 years old. He signed a five-year, $60-million contract to stay with the Pistons. The money was right, but Detroit felt right, too. Billups had been a Piston since the summer of 2002. He saw himself as a Piston for life.

If Billups had known that he would be traded a year later, would he have re-signed with the Pistons?

“No way,” he said. “No way. I don’t think anybody would. If anybody told you that if hindsight was 20/20 and they knew a year later they were going to get traded from the place that they signed, they wouldn’t sign.”

When the Pistons were wooing Billups, they talked about putting down roots in the community. Billups won the NBA’s J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award in 2008 for his charity work. His Porter-Billups Leadership Academy helps prepare at-risk kids in his hometown of Denver for college, and he planned to extend the academy to Detroit. He also ran a charity golf tournament in Michigan and wanted to invest his millions in the area, like former Pistons guards Dave Bing and Joe Dumars.

“Those were all my intentions when I signed back with Detroit — not just the basketball thing, me retiring a Piston, but me really sinking my two feet into everything that Detroit is going through,” Billups said. “Detroit has obviously been through some tough times. I think at some point here it is going to turn around. I was trying to be part of that development.

“It’s up in the air right now, to be honest with you. I won’t say it’s off the table. But when I’m doing something like that, I like to be able to have my hands on it. I like to be able to be there and do a lot of the things in person.”

Piston for life? When Billups re-signed, he seemed like a likely candidate to have his No. 1 retired. Last week, after he was traded, Billups turned on the television. And there was Allen Iverson, wearing No. 1 for the Pistons.

“I will admit, that shocked me,” he said. “It’s kind of surreal when you first get traded. But when I saw that No. 1 on TV with a different name, that’s when I said, ‘It’s official.’ ”
Heart of the team

Chauncey Billups was not just an All-Star for the Pistons. He was their captain, their soul. While several of his teammates bristled at Flip Saunders’ coaching, Billups was the glue holding Saunders to the rest of the roster — without Billups, it seemed like the whole thing could have fallen apart.

Of course, he never said that then.

But he can say it now.

“Yeah, I did, I felt that way,” he said. “It could have really got out of hand, probably, had it not been for me trying to keep everybody together.”

There is a perception that the problem was between Rasheed Wallace and Saunders. That’s not really the case.

“’Sheed was just vocal and visual about his (frustration),” Billups said. “I can’t say it was all Rasheed or it was only Rasheed. But even with that, I just still feel like that should have never come into play. I feel like no matter what the coach is doing, how you feel or whatever, you can’t cheat your teammates and not give maximum effort because you’re mad at the coach.

“I think that cost us at least one championship.”

Really? Which one?

“At least one,” he said.

Billups also said “don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming anybody.” He didn’t take sides and didn’t really defend Saunders. His point was that the Pistons let their differences with their coach get in the way of their ultimate goal.

“I don’t point fingers,” he said. “I just think problems, and maybe disbelief in Flip on a player or two’s behalf, cost us in some different series that I thought, had we been locked in, we could have won.”

Is it fair to say there was a lack of respect for Saunders?

“That probably is a fair term.”

When the Pistons fired Saunders and hired Michael Curry this year, Billups expected to have a smoother ride.

“I felt like now I could just play,” he said. “ ‘I don’t have to overexert myself in that area. We got somebody that can control and keep everybody right. I can just play.’ That was my mind-set.”

He laughed.

“I got two games of that.”
Haunting unknowns

Billups said he has no regrets. He did everything the best way he knew how at the time. But what-ifs … yeah, he has plenty of those.

What if he hadn’t injured his hamstring in last year’s playoffs?

“I felt like if it’s not for my injury, (even) with Flip, we win the championship last year,” he said. “I think we win it all and that No. 1 has still got BILLUPS on the back of it.”

What if the Pistons had kept their core together for one more run? I mentioned to Billups that I understood why they made the trade, and I thought most people understood … and it became clear that he didn’t understand.

“I still don’t know, man,” Billups said. “I hear a lot about two, three years from now, next year. … I don’t know. But I will say this: Teams don’t make deals caring about if you’re gonna understand it. I’m here to play basketball. So it really doesn’t matter.”

What if Hamilton had known that Billups was going to be traded? The normally affable Hamilton was so upset by the trade that he didn’t talk to the media for several days. Would Rip have signed his contract extension without Chauncey on the roster? Did the Pistons wait until the contract was signed before making the deal?

“If Rip would have knew that this deal was going on, I just don’t know that he would have signed that extension,” Billups said. “It was kind of funny to me that they announced this trade the same day that he signed. I really don’t know. … It just seemed weird to me. He signed that extension three days before the trade. … I think it might have been a little different if all this was exposed early.”

What if Billups had seen this coming, back in June of 2007, when the Pistons used a high draft pick to draft point guard Rodney Stuckey? What if he had left then, as a free agent?

We know this much: The same fans who cheered Iverson’s arrival would have ripped Billups for leaving. The media probably would have piled on, too. In the hypocritical world of modern sports, we expect loyalty from athletes but not from teams.

“If I do something different and leave, then I come back and people are gonna be like, ‘How are you gonna do that to us?’ ” Billups said. “Now this happens to me, now who are they looking at and saying, ‘How are you gonna do that to Chaunce?’ It’s a double-standard. But that’s just how this game is. I understand that.”

While Billups was in that hotel room with Hamilton and Prince, laughing and crying, his phone rang. It was an old teammate.

Ben Wallace.

“We put him on speaker,” Billups said. “He was basically saying, ‘First me, now you.’ But I was like, ‘You left on your own, dog! You chose to get out of there. I didn’t.’ It was funny.”
Onward and upward

Chauncey Billups says he is “not bitter.” He says he is in a good situation in Denver, in his hometown, and he is lucky that way. He definitely doesn’t want anybody’s sympathy, and he wishes the Pistons only the best.

And maybe that is the point here: Chauncey Billups is what we say we want. He was a great player who connected with the fans, pulled his teammates together, did charity work and appreciated his city. Now he is gone, and fans and columnists (myself included) applauded the move, and you have to wonder: What do we really want?

Thursday afternoon, in a hotel lounge in Cleveland, Chauncey Billups put up his fists.

He was talking about being sucker-punched by reality.

“After my last trade, when I got traded from Denver to Orlando (in 2000), I vowed to never let my hands down and get caught like that again,” he said. “That was two or three times already in my young career. I vowed to never put my hands down, to get comfortable again.

“I allowed myself to do that again. And I think it was because of what we’d done there, man … the team, the success we had, me signing a long-term deal. I allowed myself to say, ‘Damn, I think I’m done. I think I’m here. I think it’s over.’ I’m kicking myself for letting my guard down.”
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Billups on the Trade

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