Top 100 NBA Players: #79 - Chauncey Billups

Chauncey Billups

Chauncey Billups was one of the most successful playoff players in modern years, leading his team to the Conference Finals in 7 straight years, a streak that has only been matched by two players in the past 35 years, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He may not have ever been considered a superstar, but he was a star player for nearly a decade, and a winner for most of that time.

On six of those 7 Conference Final teams, Billups was one of the top 3 players on his team, first for the Pistons teams that kept making deep playoff runs, then for Denver after a trade took him out west. Here are his stats for those seasons in the regular season and the playoffs.

Billups (Regular Season) - 17.1 pts, 3.3 reb, 6.4 ast
Billups (Playoffs) - 18.0 pts, 3.5 reb, 6.0 ast

You can see that he kicked it up one notch in the playoffs, but others have made more impressive jumps. When the Pistons won the NBA Finals, Billups was voted the MVP, even though Rip Hamilton was probably a better player throughout those playoffs, as you can see from these numbers:

Billups - 16.4 pts, 3.0 reb, 5.9 ast
Hamilton - 21.5 pts, 4.6 reb, 4.2 ast

Billups was definitely the best player for Detroit in their return trip to the Finals the next year, when he bumped those averages up to 18.7 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 6.5 assists, but Detroit lost to the Spurs, costing him a chance at consecutive Finals MVP's.

Billups is also one of the best free throw shooters of all time, with a career average of .894, which places him in sixth place in NBA history, behind only Steve Nash, Rick Barry, Stephen Curry, Mark Price, and Peja Stojakovic. His clutch free throw shooting was a very important reason for his success, because his team was able to keep one of its best players on the floor at the most important times.