Trail Blazers Hire Nate Bjorkgren, Chris Fleming to Join Chauncey Billups' Staff
Two of the organization's three open assistant coaching roles are now filled.
Heading into draft week, the Trail Blazers have now gotten one piece of pressing offseason business done, filling two of the three open assistant coaching spots on Chauncey Billups’ staff. Former Pacers head coach Nate Bjorkgren, most recently an assistant with the Raptors, and former Bulls, Nets and Nuggets assistant Chris Fleming are joining Billups’ staff, the team announced on Monday morning.
Bjorkgren’s hiring doesn’t come as much of a surprise as he was working as a consultant for Billups’ staff dating back to last season. He’s been a regular presence at the Blazers’ predraft workouts over the past month. Fleming spent the last five seasons with the Bulls and was let go after the end of last season amid a larger coaching-staff shakeup in Chicago.
The Blazers are going through a similar coaching overhaul. At the end of the season, they didn’t renew the contracts of lead assistant Scott Brooks or Billups’ brother, Rodney, and another assistant, Steve Hetzel, left to become the lead assistant under newly hired Brooklyn Nets head coach Jordi Fernandez. The two spots Bjorkgren and Fleming are filling are those of Brooks and Hetzel; Rodney Billups’ spot, further down the bench, is still open and will be filled before the start of training camp. The rest of Billups’ assistants from last year, Roy Rogers, Jonah Herscu and Mark Tyndale, remain in place.
Bjorkgren came up as a head coach in the G League and rose to prominence as an assistant on Nick Nurse’s staff in Toronto before landing the top job in Indiana in the fall of 2020. His run as Pacers head coach lasted just one season and was widely viewed as a disaster due to criticisms of his abrasive leadership style. After he was let go, he rejoined Nurse in Toronto and stayed there for two seasons until Nurse was fired last summer. Despite the personality concerns in his lone season as a head coach, his tactical basketball acumen is well-regarded around the NBA.
Fleming joined the Bulls from Brooklyn as Jim Boylen’s lead assistant ahead of the 2019-20 season and stuck around after Boylen was replaced by Billy Donovan the following offseason. He spent one season under Michael Malone in Denver in 2015-16 before going to Brooklyn to work under Kenny Atkinson. He also has significant international experience, having won four German league championships as the head coach of Brose/Bamberg Baskets in the late 2000s and early 2010s and served as the head coach of the German national team from 2014 to 2017. He’s interviewed for several head coaching jobs in the NBA in his years as an assistant.
Sean Highkin
The changes to Billups’ coaching staff come as the head coach is entering a make-or-break year. The Blazers hold a team option for the 2025-26 season that, as of now, has not been picked up. Without any guarantees beyond this coming year, Billups will go into the second year of the post-Damian Lillard rebuild as a lame duck, meaning these newly hired assistants also won’t have any assurances on their status beyond the summer of 2025. Portland holds the No. 7, 14, 34 and 40 overall picks in this week’s draft and is squarely in development mode as an organization.
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