Chauncey Billups was arrested Thursday for being linked to a high-profile gambling case. He is being accused of tipping off his circle of gamblers about the availability of his star players on the Blazers prior to them ever being on an injury report. With Billups’ proclivity towards betting coming to the forefront, former Blazer Hassan Whiteside has decided to get in a few jabs of his own.
Advertisement
It wasn’t just Billups who was indicted however. Kash Patel and the FBI arrested 31 individuals which included multiple members of the Italian mafia along with former NBA player Damon Jones.
Prosecutors have stated the organizers of these high-stakes gambling rings used technologically advanced methods such as rigged card-shuffling machines and x-ray devices on unsuspecting patrons to gain an advantage.
Billups and Jones’ roles were to lure these gamblers into these games due to their ‘celebrity status’. Since 2019, $7.15 million have been stolen from victims of these gambling games.
Whiteside, in the midst of this entire debacle, seems to have “figured out” why the Blazers never re-signed him despite his fairly decent output. His reasoning? Billups and his betting.
“Ok now I understand why he didn’t want to re-sign me to the Blazers when he became the coach. I was averaging 18 points, 14 rebounds, and 3 blocks, leading the league.”
Hassan Whiteside bro pic.twitter.com/f2uZ7yh8Xj
— | (@HoodieNaz_) October 23, 2025
Whiteside played a single season in Portland in 2019-20 where he actually averaged 15.5 points per game in 67 outings, not 18. He did however lead the league in blocks with 2.9 and finished 11th in DPOY voting.
Billups didn’t take over as the head coach of the Blazers until the 2021-22 season. By then, Hassan had left PDX for teams like the Kings and the Jazz and was clearly not the same player he was when with Portland, let alone who he was when on Miami.
Of course, given Hassan’s penchant for humor, this could all be a sarcastic outtake on the situation from the former All-Defensive big-man. Though, if it isn’t, it’s highly unlikely that one of Chauncey first “big moves” as a gambling head coach in the NBA was centered around not signing him.
