Mr. Big Shot is being immortalized on basketball’s biggest stage. Chauncey Billups, who earned five All-Star appearances and spent his best years as a pro as a member of the Detroit Pistons, including winning a championship and Finals MVP, is headed to the Naismith Basketball Hlall of Fame, according to The Athletic’s Shams Charania. Billups will be joined in the Hall by Toronto Raptors legend Vince Carter, Charania reports.
The full Hall of Fame class will be announced Saturday at the Final Four.
Billups went from hyped up third overall pick in 1997 to NBA vagabond, shuttling between four teams in the first four seasons of his career. The Detroit Pistons, headed by legendary Pistons guard and Hall of Famer Joe Dumars, saw something in the well-traveled Billups. They saw a leader, a scorer, a facilitator, and a dog.
The Pistons signed Billups to a four-year contract for the full mid-level exception in 2002, and ended up with not only one of the great guards of his era but one of the biggest free agent steals in NBA history.
He helped lead the Pistons to a title in 2003-04, winning MVP against the heralded Los Angeles Lakers led by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, and a return trip to the Finals a year later against Tim Duncan’s San Antonio Spurs.
The Finals against the Lakers, known in Detroit as the “five-game sweep” was heralded at the time as the Lakers being home to the biggest superstars and the Pistons being home to zero superstars but the best, and most cohesive team.
That wasn’t quite right. The Pistons were the best team, for sure, but they did have two superstars on their roster — Ben Wallace, elected to the Hall of Fame in 2021, and Billups, reportedly elected this season.
The Pistons made it to the Eastern Conference Finals behind these two superstars, along with Richard Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace and Tayshaun Prince, in six consecutive seasons. Just as Billups heralded a new, championship-level era for the Pistons, his departure signaled the end of the road, and the franchise still hasn’t recovered from the error.
Billups was traded two games into the 2008-09 season along with Antonio McDyess for Allen Iverson. It was a disaster for Detroit, with Iverson having clearly lost a step, team cohesion out the window, and zero seasons above .500 in the 16 years since.
Mr. Big Shot, though, proved a better fit alongside Carmelo Anthony in Denver, and a better player than AI. He made two more All-Star appearances and two playoff runs in Denver, including a Western Conference Finals appearance in 2009.
Billups was the ideal basketball nerds dream player before anyone really knew what that even meant. When advanced analytics were still hard to find and the vocabulary hadn’t been established, Billups was an ultra-efficient dynamo.
The problem was, he played in a mediocre Detroit offense that played at one of the slowest paces in the NBA. Today, we look at players like Billups, with true shooting percentages above 60%, free-throw rates above 50%, and 40% 3-point shooting with supreme assist-to-turnover ratios and see one thing — superstars. Billups never got that label, even though he always deserved it.
He was the best offensive point guard of his era besides Steve Nash, and he played much better defense than Nash. He was always great, he always deserved to be in the Hall of Fame, and now he’s been enshrined. Great job, Mr. Big Shot. You earned it.