The Trail Blazers interviewed Becky Hammon to be their head coach. They hired a former player accused of rape instead.

• The Trail Blazers hired Chauncey Billups as their new head coach, passing over Becky Hammon.
• Billups was accused of rape in 1997, and the Blazers' treatment of his past has led to controversy.
• It appears Portland may have used Hammon's candidacy as a distraction.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

Chauncey Billups is officially the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers.

Spearheaded by General Manager Neil Olshey, Portland officially extended an offer for Billups to become the team's leading man earlier this week. In hiring the NBA great, the Trail Blazers became the latest franchise to pass over longtime San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon for a head coaching position.

They also became the latest to employ a coach who has faced accusations of violence against women.

Billups was accused of rape in 1997. Though the former floor general never faced criminal charges from the incident, the violent nature of the survivor's account paired with Portland's treatment of the matter has ignited controversy across the NBA.

The more Portland's front office, and general manager Neil Olshey in particular, reveals about the process that went into selecting Billups, the more it appears the Trail Blazers were disingenuous about their intentions for Hammon, who is widely expected to become the NBA's first woman head coach.

Portland had a diverse list of candidates for its head-coach vacancy

After parting ways with eight-year head coach Terry Stotts, the Trail Blazers reportedly considered a wide array of candidates to lead the franchise. Among the contenders were Brooklyn Nets assistant Mike D'Antoni, San Antonio Spurs vice president of basketball operations Brent Barry, and South Carolina women's basketball head coach Dawn Staley in addition to Billups and Hammon, according to The Athletic's Shams Charania.

Over the week that followed, that group whittled down to three - D'Antoni, Billups, and Hammon, per ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski. Then, the list shrunk again; Billups and Hammon were the apparent finalists.

No woman had ever reached the last round of an NBA head-coaching search before. Between her standing as a finalist and Portland's inclusion of other women in its initial search, the team seemed to have taken a revolutionary approach to its hiring process.

It was an exciting moment for women - until it wasn't.

The Blazers hired an alleged rapist in Chauncey Billups

When Billups was a rookie with the Boston Celtics in 1997, a woman accused him and his teammate, Ron Mercer, of assaulting her in the home of a third player, Antoine Walker. The account of the incident that follows may be disturbing for some readers.

According to court documents, the accuser, a woman known in the lawsuit as Jane Doe, told police that in a bedroom in Walker's home, three men - Billups, Mercer, and Michael Irvin - subjected her to "a series of sexual acts, including sexual intercourse, without her consent and despite her attempted resistance."

According to details from Jeff Benedict's book "Out of Bounds: Inside the NBA's Culture of Rape, Violence, and Crime" shared in Sports Illustrated, Doe alleged that she awoke the following morning "naked amid used condoms and condom wrappers littered across the floor," with one of Walker's friends beside her. She sought medical attention later that day, which "revealed bruises about Doe's body and injuries to her throat, cervix, and rectum, and she was diagnosed as suffering from shock."

Billups insists that he did not go to Walker's condo that night, though he told police at the time that he received consensual oral sex from Doe in his car, according to court documents. Billups never faced criminal charges, though he and Mercer settled a civil case with Doe for "an undisclosed sum" more than two years later, per the Washington Post.

'You're just going to have to take our word'

Though Jody Allen - the chair of the franchise - reportedly believed Hammon was the best option to become her team's next head coach, the Trail Blazers ultimately opted for Billups. That decision was fueled by Olshey, who has a close personal relationship with the five-time NBA All-Star and favored him for the job.

In hiring any man over Hammon, the Blazers were sure to disappoint some fans by passing up the opportunity to break men's professional sports' hardest glass ceiling. But by anointing the former Detroit Pistons standout as Portland's commander in chief, they did not merely disappoint fans; they ignored, insulted, and silenced many survivors of assault and women in general.

Olshey failed to allay concerns about Billups at a press conference announcing his hiring. According to Bleacher Report's Sean Highkin, Olshey offered very little information about the franchise's investigation into the 1997 incident beyond that the findings "corroborated Chauncey's recollection of the events, that nothing non-consensual happened."

"With all sincerity, and you have my word," Olshey said, per Highkin, adding, "we took the allegations very seriously, and we treated them with the gravity that they deserve."

When pressed for details about how the team conducted the investigation, Olshey responded, "that's proprietary."

"You're just going to have to take our word that we hired an experienced firm that ran an investigation that gave us the results we already discussed," he added.

Billups, for his part, acknowledged during the press conference that the 1997 incident "has shaped my life in many different ways." But when The Athletic's Jason Quick asked the new head coach to elaborate, a member of the team's public relations staff shut him down.

Was Becky Hammon a serious candidate or just a distraction?

During the press conference, Olshey also managed to put his foot in his mouth while addressing Hammon's candidacy for the head coaching position.

"We obviously admire Becky. She did a great job," Olshey said. "Making it as far as the owner in the process isn't easy. She made it all the way to the ownership level, which is an endorsement."

It certainly wasn't received that way, with sports commentators calling the comments "patronizing" and "gross" on Twitter.

Hammon has seven seasons of assistant coaching experience under one of the most highly-regarded play-callers in the league in Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich. She is qualified to receive a final-round interview and speak to the owners. It's laughable to imply that merely reaching that point in the process was an accomplishment for a coach of Hammon's caliber - or it would be, had it not been suggested by the man who failed to hire her.

Billups, meanwhile, has spent less than a season sitting on the Los Angeles Clippers' bench as an assistant behind longtime pal Ty Lue. But Olshey didn't seem to see his limited experience as an issue.

"There were definitely people that had a bigger body of work, more things we could point to, and we interviewed some of them," Olshey said Tuesday. "We were looking for somebody that I know has natural gravitas, leadership skills... and we were willing to bet on the upside, quite honestly, instead of kind of knowing the known."

At best, this is bad optics. At worst, the engagement with Hammon was exploitative.

The Trail Blazers may have included Hammon in their search in good faith. They may have hoped she could leverage her experience from her time in San Antonio and her years as a WNBA All-Star to push a promising Portland squad to new heights. And it's possible that in the course of their search, they came upon a better candidate - one with "gravitas."

But I suspect there was a more Machiavellian plan set in motion; the franchise pretended to seriously consider Hammon and strung her along to divert attention away from the allegations against their true top choice.

Leveraging the potential of breaking the NBA's gender barrier to appear progressive publicly while ignoring and burying rape claims privately would be a despicable move. But there are other aspects of what went down in Portland that add insult to injury. Undermining Hammon's credibility by using her candidacy as bait is repugnant. So too is ignoring the countless survivors and women who have spoken out against Billups as a viable coaching hire.

But perhaps worst of all was the Blazers' arrogant assumption that they'd get away with their ruse: infantilizing the most qualified among us, elevating a problematic, less deserving man, and expecting women to be too stupid to notice.

The Portland Trail Blazers offered no further comment.